Wasn’t really picking winners of course. More like ‘oh my loan is now a share I guess I got landed with a loser well let’s spin the hell out of it anyway and see if the share is ever worth any £.’
https://twitter.com/williamnhutton/status/1437695427130892288
Even a govt that was acting in good faith would be in a tricky situation here. Duty to be open, accountable, honest, may conflict with its financial interests, and interests in cooperating with the other shareholders that follow from that.
If they announced 'mea culpa, we have been stuck with these random basket case companies that we loaned money to, which can't be repaid now, hoping that if we got money out the door fast we'd do much more good than harm and maybe that's still true' they might sink them.
Anyway if HMT want part time staff to go to some cool board meetings, I will def apply.
As @Wikisteff comments in replies, the next set of questions will be 'why these companies?' 'who benefited?' 'what were there relationships with government or government supporters?
The difficulty of answering these questions [and as we have seen from @JolyonMaugham led investigations into covid procurement, the possibility that there are bad answers to them] is one of the reasons for avoiding govt subsidy/investment policies in normal times.
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