Thames Water: Britain’s biggest utility just got captured by toxic private credit markets

The following article is a guest piece by Philip Greenwood, from campaign group Waterways Protection

By 2027, your water bills will be up. Your rivers will still stink. And two American credit funds will be quietly sailing off with the profits via Thames Water.

Thames Water: KKR looked inside – and ran

In June 2025, KKR – one of the world’s most aggressive private equity firms – circled Thames Water.

This is a firm that’s happily turned collapsed retailers, energy firms, and hospitals into gold mines. It sent in consultants. Built the models. Briefed Whitehall. And then?

Nothing.

No bid. No press release. Just silence. Because inside Thames, it didn’t find a turnaround story; it found a corpse in a pinstripe suit:

• £19bn in debt, hidden across offshore holding companies and synthetic
  structures
• £20bn+ in required upgrades – just to stop raw sewage spilling into rivers
• A regulator too timid or captured to act
• No ability to raise prices
• Criminal investigations in motion

Even KKR – who survived Toys “R” Us, TXU, Envision, and worse – walked. Quietly. Completely.

That left a vacuum. And in finance, vacuum equals opportunity.

The new owners are already here

No headlines. No shareholder vote. No press call.

But Thames Water is now effectively controlled by two US credit powerhouses: Silver Point Capital and Elliott Management.

They didn’t buy shares. They bought the debt stack.
And when the covenants broke – they took control.

No fuss. No delay. Just a clean corporate coup.

Silver Point: the scalpel

Founded by two ex-Goldman Sachs partners, Silver Point is a distress-focused credit shop with a surgical approach to broken companies.

What it does:

• Buy distressed bonds at deep discounts
• Wait for covenant breaches
• Use creditor rights to seize control
• Replace boards, restructure debt
• Strip the business for value
• Exit – fast

It doesn’t run utilities. It doesn’t fix them. It takes them apart like stolen cars in a chop shop.

It works quietly, surgically, and without PR. When Silver Point shows up, management disappears – and the spreadsheet becomes law.

Elliott Management: the hammer

Elliott isn’t just a hedge fund. It’s a legal and financial enforcement machine.

Run by Paul Singer, Elliott is infamous in sovereign debt circles – and feared in corporate boardrooms.
It has:

• Sued Argentina and seized a navy frigate as collateral
• Blocked Dell’s $25bn buyout
• Forced out Twitter’s CEO
• Targeted Samsung, SoftBank, AT&T – and won

Its strategy isn’t “turnaround.” It’s value extraction through pressure and law. It doesn’t negotiate. It files motions.

At Thames, it watched the covenants crack – and pulled the trigger. All legal. All silent. All done.

How they took control

There was no buyout. No regulator resistance. No shareholder vote. Just covenants – those fine-print clauses in debt contracts that shift power when things go south.

Thames Water broke its financial ratios. The covenants triggered.

And that gave Silver Point and Elliott:

• Board control
• Shareholder override powers
• Full authority to rewrite the capital stack

This wasn’t a rescue. This was debt-enabled corporate seizure.

Water bills are going up for Thames Water customers

This is not a recovery story. It’s a value extraction plan – engineered for creditors, not the country.

Expect 25–35% hikes within 18 months.

The threat will be simple: “Raise prices or Thames collapses”.

Ofwat will blink. Politicians will nod. The public will pay the margin.

That’s not a side effect. That’s the monetisation strategy.

A new Thames Water board will be a financial hit squad

Forget water experts. This isn’t operations – it’s execution.

The likely playbook:

• Alvarez & Marsal – crisis consultants for Carillion and Lehman
• Houlihan Lokey – asset sale strategists
• Kirkland & Ellis – legal muscle for transatlantic takeovers

Their job? Make Thames “clean” enough to sell – and dump the rest.

Innovation will be cosmetic

The public will be sold a story of transformation:

• AI-powered leak detection
• ESG-linked bonds
• Digital infrastructure dashboards

But behind the PR:

• No real pipe upgrades
• No pollution reduction
• Fines treated as operating costs

Call it what it is: a Fitbit on a corpse.

The carve-up is already in motion

The endgame is familiar. It’s a two-company play:

• New Thames – PR-friendly brand, clean assets, IPO-ready
• ‘OldCo’ – fines, lawsuits, legacy debt, environmental liabilities

New Thames will be sold or floated by 2027. OldCo? Buried offshore. Written off. Forgotten.

It has already happened elsewhere:

• TXU
• PG&E
• Mallinckrodt
• Debenhams
• Carillion

Same model. Same silence. Same result.

The real cost

This isn’t just about Thames.

It’s a template for distressed UK infrastructure:

• Load it with debt
• Strip it for yield
• Wait for collapse
• Let the creditors in
• Repackage the remains
• Sell it on

Behind every utility bill is a financial scheme no one voted for – and no one was meant to understand.

This is not regulation. It’s not public service. It’s structured extraction.

Final word

By 2027, you’ll be invited to invest in ‘New Thames’ – a gleaming ESG-brochured success story.

But here’s what they won’t tell you:

• £40bn in liabilities buried offshore
• Rivers still choked with effluent
• A regulator who folded
• Water bills still rising

This wasn’t a rescue. It was a re-branding – for profit, not repair.

Britain’s water. The public’s bill. Their exit. Their payday. Their yacht.

The logical take on Thames Water

This is not the behavior of a functioning society stewarding its vital systems. It’s economic cannibalism in a tailored suit.

What we’re watching isn’t innovation. It’s late-stage finance cosplay – where parasitic capital masquerades as stewardship, while asset-stripping the infrastructure that makes civilisation possible.

Water. Energy. Rail. Health. All of it up for sale. All of it mortgaged to funds who see rivers, pipes, and people as line items on a cap table.

And the irony?

The state could take this asset back today. It could restructure the debt, raise the tariffs, and reinvest the proceeds for the public – keeping the upside, strengthening the economy, modernising the system.

But it won’t.

Because our governments are either:

• Too financially illiterate to understand the instruments
• Too ideologically captured to challenge the system
• Or too cowardly to do anything but watch as public goods are auctioned off and bled dry.

So instead, we privatise the gains and socialise the sludge. Again.

We are not managing a modern economy. We are administering its slow and gleaming liquidation.

Featured image via the Canary