1. Why is it more difficult to agree on a post-Kyoto Climate Agreement than on the Montreal Protocol (ozone layer)? 2. As crippling repayments on private finance initiative (PFI) contracts force NHS hospitals to make cuts, a new report reveals that the firms profiting from the deals are using tax havens to avoid paying millions of pounds in tax. 3. A report by the European Services Strategy Unit, and covered in the Sunday Times, reveals that as many as 70 NHS PFI projects are based off-shore. 4. Expensive PFI contracts have become a huge burden on dozens of NHS trusts. Last week the government announced that ‘hit squads’ of senior government auditors are to be dispatched to seven NHS trusts who are struggling to pay PFI bills. Earlier this year, South London Healthcare Trust, which manages three South London hospitals, was the first trust forced into administration after its £61m annual PFI bills saw the trust’s budget deficit spiral unsustainably. 5. These budgetry black holes are having a real impact on patient care. In a paper for the British Medical Journal, academic Alyson Pollack claims that hospitals blighted by expensive PFI contracts are compromising on care, reducing staff numbers and cutting frontline services. 6. The findings of the European Services Strategy Unit report make particularly unsavoury reading given this backdrop of threatened patient care. 7. The Queen Elizabeth hospital in Woolwich, one of those run by the distressed South London Healthcare Trust, is just one of the PFI contracts implicated in the report. 8. The first hospital in London to be built with PFI money, the Queen Elizabeth is part-owned by three separate funds: Semperian PPP Investment Partners, Innisfree and John Laing Infrastructure Fund (JLIF). Guernsey-based JLIF owns over a quarter of the hospital along with a raft of other PFI stakes in hospital, housing and school-building projects. The firm paid just 2.5% tax on a £14.62m profit in the first six months of its financial year. 9. The revelations are not the first time that PFI firms have been shown to use off-shore companies. In April last year a BBC investigation revealed that HICL, an HSBC-established fund and one of the country’s biggest investors in PFI contracts, was paying less than half a percent tax on its £38m profit. Its portfolio of PFI investments included stakes in Portsmouth Hospital and the John Radcliffe in Oxford. 10. A spokesman for JLIF said said its infrastructure assets in the UK ‘pay normal corporation tax rates in the UK and the shareholders in JLIF pay tax on dividends and capital gains arising from their shares.’ 11. HICL Infrastructure said it had registered in Guernsey because it could not list on the London Stock Exchange without a trading history. The company said it invested in a large number of companies which were incorporated in the UK and subject to UK tax. 12. Established under John Major’s Conservative government in the early 1990s before being massively expanded under Blair, PFI committed dozens of NHS trusts to contracts that soon became absurdly expensive and unsustainable. A 2007 NHS report found that fixed running costs (cleaning, maintenance etc.) at PFI-funded hospitals were often twice as high as the equivalent services at hospitals not locked in to long term contracts with private firms.