BAA

It was collusion on a massive scale; a stich-up so great that no one would believe it - until 5 of us took to the rooftops to shout about it. Documents obtained by Greenpeace under the Freedom of Information Act show beyond any doubt that BAA and the Department for Transport sat down to fiddle the figures and re-write the consultation on expanding Heathrow airport. But that was just the beginning...

After the rooftop action last week, someone slipped the Sunday Times even more documents (1 / 2 / 3 / 4), and their investigative reporters looked into it further. What they found showed that the collusion went further than even we'd imagined - that the government abandoned its own data on noise and pollution in favour of dodgy data collected by BAA. They set up 'Project Heathrow', headed up by senior civil servant David Gray, to fix the "strict local environmental limits" in favour of expansion. In the words of one official who worked on the project: "It’s a classic case of reverse engineering. They knew exactly what results they wanted and fixed the inputs to get there."

As the end of the Heathrow consultation gets closer, the eyes of the business community turn towards BAA. Expansion can reap financial rewards for investors, and those fat cats in trading houses across the City are always seeking to make some bucks. But is BAA a good investment opportunity?

Not according to the Times, which has dug up a report by investment bank JP Morgan. Those bankers aren't feeling optimistic about the company, claiming that “Based on existing capex facilities [the loan available to pay for capital expenditure] we expect BAA could run out of cash in Q1-2 2009”.

Ouch! Not what Stephen Nelson and his cronies want you to hear. But it's not the first time that analysts have doubted BAA's finances. Last month the Sunday Times reported that BAA was to make a year-end test of whether it was in breach of the covenants on some its loans, and last year we reported that financiers had downgraded BAA's economic status to 'junk'. Looks like that third runway might be a longer shot than we'd thought...

In October, Plane Stupid reported how Tom Kelly - the Blairite spin doctor who had to apologise to David Kelly's family after calling him a Walter Mitty character - had gone to join BAA as their director of corporate affairs.

The Guardian writes today that he commutes to work between Northern Ireland and Heathrow and that he denies BAA might just have taken him on for his ministerial phone book.

"The last thing I would want to be seen to do is play on the contacts I have from government."

I can't believe BAA would hire a spin doctor for his contacts. Surely the only spin they'd want from him would be on the tennis courts?

A radical fringe of corporate citizens, including BAA, British Airways and easyJet, has threatened to disrupt the international talks on climate change in Bali.

The group calling themselves, Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change (CLGCC) has ominously promised that it will 'hand deliver' the 'the Bali Communique' to the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, despite the high security measures surrounding him. The communique demands that emission reduction targets should be guided primarily by science rather than political or economic motivations - a radical departure from the current position of growth at all costs.