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Crossrail opening delayed (opening date not yet known)

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kevin_roche

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What annoys me is that the press continue to blame the issues on signalling and the train software when the real issue was that neither the signalling or train software could be installed and tested properly until the tunnels were complete and trains able to run in them. It was quite obvious that Bond Street was never going to be finished on time.

There used to be a timetable on the hoardings which detailed the steps. It said the station would be complete in 2016 and train testing would happen after that. They took that sign down down in 2018 after it had become a real joke.
 
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kevin_roche

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There used to be a timetable on the hoardings which detailed the steps.

You can see it toward the bottom of this interesting blog entry: https://hydeparknow.uk/2018/12/08/crossrail-a-failed-prophecy/

DSC_0246.jpg
 

3141

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It was quite obvious that Bond Street was never going to be finished on time.

There used to be a timetable on the hoardings which detailed the steps. It said the station would be complete in 2016 and train testing would happen after that. They took that sign down in 2018 after it had become a real joke.

So by 2017 it should have been possible to work out that how much further work was needed at a site that was already late. Or that it was so far behind that working out what was needed was going to require a special effort and an entirely new work programme.

I'm not saying that this holds exactly true for Crossrail specifically, but there's a bit of blame for both sides really: those producing the progress reports and those setting & receiving them....This is how delays go un-noticed and snowball into bigger issues on large construction sites, dealing with vast quantities, in an organisation with a very removed management team solely reliant on the information provided by others.

A very interesting explanation about how such situations can arise. With a huge project and a large number of individual contracts it must be very difficult to keep an accurate track of progress, and the system for doing so must have been inadequate - or perhaps, even, the programme itself was unrealistic from the start. Like Domeyhead in #1469, I find it most unsatisfactory that the people whose job was to bring the project to completion and who must have known that it was nowhere near that don't get held to account in some way. Though when applying for another job it can't be very helpful to put "former chief executive of Crossrail" or your CV.
 

Domeyhead

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I'm not saying that this holds exactly true for Crossrail specifically, but there's a bit of blame for both sides really: those producing the progress reports and those setting & receiving them. As long as some work is being done, it can be easy to hide productive progress towards a single milestone if the KPI is badly set and the contractor goes after the low-hanging fruit first. I've seen this on other railway construction projects where there are vast quantities of particular items/materials involved.

Say, for instance, I was in charge of a construction site and I had a weekly KPI for tonnage of re-bar to be installed in preperation for a series of seperate concrete pours. The logical approach would be to complete each section 100% in-turn (to enable the pour) and then move onto the next area. However, say there's a technical issue that prevents me completing each of the installations beyond 95%.

But, I want to keep getting paid and reporting good progress so instead of flagging this and halting works, I press on with installing as much remaining rebar as I can prior to the resolution of the issue. To the outside observer I'm precisely on-plan for the tonnage of rebar I should be installing; it's only when you delve into the detail do you see that none of my installations are fully complete and I've been going after the low-hanging fuit to keep the numbers-up. At the end of the day, my 95% installed rebar is as good for a concrete pour as 0% complete - it's all or northing. Finally, the issue with the last 5% is resolved and it entails removing lots of the previously installed re-bar and starting again.

This is how delays go un-noticed and snowball into bigger issues on large construction sites, dealing with vast quantities, in an organisation with a very removed management team solely reliant on the information provided by others.

Ah that sounds familiar! In fact it's so familiar everyone in project management dreads hearing that tasks are "95% complete"! I know this goes on in every large project - but one of the reason project managers exists is to know how large project teams function and all the human rigmarole that goes with it. Good project managers are paid very well because they should be wise to all the foibles of overoptimistic reporting. I don't blame contractors if they can manage to get paid even if the job is not quite done, but a senior PMs role is to make sure this doesn't happen, by ensuring no milestone is passed unless the construction manager has signed it off as such, on pain of his own suffering. In the case of a huge project as large as Crossrail the senior PMs, PEs and PDs will have been on equally large remunerations because they were good enough to control and manage what the Gantt charts were trying to hide from everyone else. THere are ways and means that ensure this is done, but in this case it didn't happen. If the project was structured such that the management were also paid bonusses on the same milestones as construction contractors then that puts foxes in the chicken coop and should have seen the chief executive dismissed without all the gold plated severance payments he no doubt picked up.
 

MarlowDonkey

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What annoys me is that the press continue to blame the issues on signalling and the train software when the real issue was that neither the signalling or train software could be installed and tested properly until the tunnels were complete and trains able to run in them.

The line to Heathrow was operational before Crossrail was even started. They haven't yet got the dedicated Crossrail trains running to Heathrow, apparently due to signalling and software issues on the Heathrow branch.
 

JamesT

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What annoys me is that the press continue to blame the issues on signalling and the train software when the real issue was that neither the signalling or train software could be installed and tested properly until the tunnels were complete and trains able to run in them. It was quite obvious that Bond Street was never going to be finished on time.

There used to be a timetable on the hoardings which detailed the steps. It said the station would be complete in 2016 and train testing would happen after that. They took that sign down down in 2018 after it had become a real joke.

My understanding is that the tunnels have been complete for some time. Fitting out stations doesn't stop you running trains through the tunnels for testing. They were able to run some sort of train through the tunnels in May 2018.
 

Taunton

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The problem is that the project directors and executives slimply slip away to new projects with severances paid up, and bonusses and pensions intact, when the wilful cover up is of such a scale that this should be seen as criminal negligence, or fraud. Is anybody pursuing the personnel concerned for how this happened? I would dearly like to hear that an investigative journalist is doorstepping the former Crossrail Management for explanations, because what I've seen on Youtube is an absolute criminal disgrace and many of the people responsible are actually even richer than if the project had been a success.
I agree, as someone who works with major civil engineering and building projects every day, the whole industry is astounded at how the lies, for this is what they were, got perpetrated. We also live on Crossrail, and its continuing absence is a real daily nuisance.

As the Mayor and his office are responsible for the Met Police as well as Crossrail, I do wonder if they have only been prevented from going in to investigate what I, too, regard as a fraud by the high paid senior execs because they had all been too close together.

It's not only the huge and seemingly unquantifiable delay, but the fact that little or nothing now seems to be going on. Where is the detailed delivery programme? I have regularly posted here that Custom House station was closed all through 2017 to be rebuilt as a Crossrail interchange. Was it finished at the end of 2017 after all that? No. It STILL has scaffolding up and is still not finished, and you never see anyone working on it. To the east of the station is a contractors' plant yard where substantial mechanical plant has been sat for many months just static. Is the hire of this still being charged each month to Crossrail?
 

Meerkat

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Is there any way you could really find a legal case for fraud?
Would you have to prove they were deliberately misleading for personal gain?
 

djw

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The problem is that the project directors and executives slimply slip away to new projects with severances paid up, and bonusses and pensions intact, when the wilful cover up is of such a scale that this should be seen as criminal negligence, or fraud.

There is no such thing as criminal negligence in English law other than manslaughter by gross negligence. Other than that exception, negligence is a tort - a civil wrong - not a crime.


There are three offences of fraud, which are found in sections 2 to 4 of the Fraud Act 2006. Of these, the most generally applicable is section 2 fraud by false representation. All three offences have a common mens rea of dishonestly carrying out the fraudulent act intending to make a monetary and/or property gain for themselves or another, to cause another to lose money and/or property, or to cause another a risk of losing money and/or property. Following Ivey v Genting Casinos [2017] UKSC 67, the test for dishonesty is "dishonest by the lay objective standards of ordinary reasonable and honest people" (the second limb of the former Ghosh test is no longer law).

I think it would be a long stretch to turn 'staff members being sucked into the project wide group think that we can get this done, notwithstanding growing evidence that we cannot' into establishing beyond reasonable doubt that 'one or more individuals each made a statement that the project was on track when it wasn't, knowing these statement to be untrue, intentionally exposing the project funders to a risk of loss and that the statement was dishonest in the eyes of lay people'.

The biggest barrier to a fraud prosecution is likely the requirement for intention. An individual making a dishonest statement about progress that they knew could expose the funders to a risk of loss is not enough - legally speaking that is being reckless (knowing of a risk that you go on to take) about exposing funders to a risk of loss. The act must have been intended to expose the funders to a risk of loss for there to be any possibility of fraud.

Further, statements on whether a project is on track would likely be covered by hedges and would likely be made collectively by a group of managers or a board, not a particular individual. The chief executive reporting "It is the opinion of the board of Crossrail Ltd that the project is on target for opening on time, subject to the remaining work proceeding as expected" is a very different thing from one individual stating "Crossrail will open on time".


As anyone who has followed this debacle knows, there are unanswered questions about the scrutiny of Crossrail Ltd's statements by TfL and perhaps also the DfT, which is a further complication.

Any legal remedy the funding bodies might have likely lays in contract law, as this offers wider scope for obtaining damages than tort law. There is a specialist sub-division of the Queen's Bench Division of the High Court known as the Technology and Construction Court that exists to deal with precisely this sort of dispute.

As for individual staff members, what happens on any dismissal by their employer is subject to their contract of employment and employment law.
 
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kevin_roche

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My understanding is that the tunnels have been complete for some time. Fitting out stations doesn't stop you running trains through the tunnels for testing. They were able to run some sort of train through the tunnels in May 2018.

Running trains through tunnels is one thing, testing them with all the signalling and information systems and SCADA is another. They tested what they could without signals, but for meaningful tests the essential parts of the CBTC signalling system are needed.
 

kevin_roche

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The line to Heathrow was operational before Crossrail was even started. They haven't yet got the dedicated Crossrail trains running to Heathrow, apparently due to signalling and software issues on the Heathrow branch.
Much of the delay with signalling to Heathrow is down to Network Rail not being able to get GSM-R radio, which is needed for ETCS, to work in the Terminal 4 tunnel. Network rail was supposed to install ETCS all the way between Heathrow and Paddington during CP5 (which ended in April 2019) it still has not been done and the latest is they might start at Easter. Interference between 25kV line electrics and axel counters has also been an issue with some trains on the GWML (though not the 345s).
 

Railwaysceptic

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Is there any way you could really find a legal case for fraud?
Would you have to prove they were deliberately misleading for personal gain?
Obtaining money by deception is a criminal offence. If it can be proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the assurances that all was going well, given by those who subsequently received performance related bonuses, were known by them to be false at the time they were given, then there should be grounds for a criminal prosecution. I have no idea if anything can be proved.
 

Taunton

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It's not just the pay and bonuses to the executives. The whole of the basic contract sum was paid out (because now we are having to find lots of extra money to get to completion) and yet the work had not been finished. Somewhere along the line things were being marked up as finished, which meant money was paid out, when this can now be seen to be patently false.

These are by no means unknown issues with the big bucks swilling around on large construction projects, and everyone on completion bonuses, which is why there is a whole discipline of Contract Auditors to identify these things. Where are they in all this?
 

The Ham

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It's not just the pay and bonuses to the executives. The whole of the basic contract sum was paid out (because now we are having to find lots of extra money to get to completion) and yet the work had not been finished. Somewhere along the line things were being marked up as finished, which meant money was paid out, when this can now be seen to be patently false.

These are by no means unknown issues with the big bucks swilling around on large construction projects, and everyone on completion bonuses, which is why there is a whole discipline of Contract Auditors to identify these things. Where are they in all this?

Indeed, whoever said that they had finished their works should be asked to sign to state that they and their company will be held responsible for any delays caused by their works for which they are requesting payment for of the works are find to be unsatisfactory. Any bonus payments for on time works will only be paid once the next stage of works (upon which theie works relies upon) are complete.

Likewise those running and signing off the works would also not receive bonus payments for individual stages until subsequent stages are complete and with a percentage of each phase held back until the train services were fully operational.

I'd also suggest that any bonus payments which are subsequently found to have been obtained when there was a delay to the project would be subject to repayment, including any costs associated with obtaining said repayment (i.e. Paying legal costs from Crossrail in proving that repayment was due). This would ensure that those getting said payments would want to be sure that they weren't going to be seeing a bill not only for the bonus but also for the legal costs if they were to fight it and be proved wrong.
 

Domeyhead

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It's not just the pay and bonuses to the executives. The whole of the basic contract sum was paid out (because now we are having to find lots of extra money to get to completion) and yet the work had not been finished. Somewhere along the line things were being marked up as finished, which meant money was paid out, when this can now be seen to be patently false.

These are by no means unknown issues with the big bucks swilling around on large construction projects, and everyone on completion bonuses, which is why there is a whole discipline of Contract Auditors to identify these things. Where are they in all this?
Indeed Taunton. Notwithstanding the point m'learned friends made about negligence and fraud above (which I accept) there was clearly poor or no scrutiny of the project when it was driving towards the brick wall of non delivery. Where were the NAO in all of this? We pay them to do this, just as they are currently doing with HS2. The thing that annoys everybody whether left or right, is that executive grades get various incentive and performance bonusses written into their employment contracts which if the project is failing and they are "invited to resign" , get paid to them anyway as of right. Failure is rewarded, and in many cases there is an overlap where they pick up new positions while still effectively in the severance earnings period of their previous failed engagement. WHen false statements have been made previously about the status of the project these bonusses should be forfeit. I would like to see two changes to infrastructure project appointments of this nature:
1) Bonusses should be forfeit if the project does not meet its milestone dates, or if dates were declared which subsequently turned out to be false.
2) The terms (not necessarily the amounts) of any early severance of executive appointments should be in the public domain. Thus if an executive is "paid to go quietly" we can see what was done to buy his(her) silence in the form of paid up pensions, golden handshakes and salary in lieu and so on. Some of these sums are obscene.
 

Carlisle

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I'd also suggest that any bonus payments which are subsequently found to have been obtained when there was a delay to the project would be subject to repayment,
A good idea in principle, but is it legal ?
I’ve never heard of such practices happening other than CEOs etc of failing companies shamed through public & media pressure into returning or declining bonuses
 
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Xenophon PCDGS

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A good idea in principle, but is it legal ? I’ve never heard of such practices happening other than CEOs etc of failing companies shamed through public & media pressure into returning or declining bonuses

A recent example that sprang to my mind was that of Jeff Fairburn, CEO of Persimmon, who was asked to leave four months after being awarded a £75 million bonus for what can only be described as the company "being economical with the truth in its original citation" for the size of the bonus, which led to an immediate outcry from all company sectors. When Fairburn appeared on a media interview afterwards and the matter of the bonus was was asked, Fairburn just said "It's a pity that you asked about that" and left the interview immediately before the matter could be stressed any further.
 

djw

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A good idea in principle, but is it legal ?
I’ve never heard of such practices happening other than CEOs etc of failing companies shamed through public & media pressure into returning or declining bonuses

I have no real expertise on employment law, but I would expect many of the 'agree to leave without notice but with all your bonuses' deals are akin to an out of court settlement - rather than the situation being handled like a dismissal, with the attendant risk of a claim being made to the Employment Tribunal and possible appeals thereafter, the parties mutually agree to terminate the contract of employment with bonuses paid in full. Whilst the payment of bonuses for what amounts to failure is of questionable ethics, the bonus money was budgeted for and the (soon to be former) employer has certainty that the matter is resolved. There is also the possibility of inserting a non-disclosure clause into an agreement to terminate, but such a clause might be of limited effectiveness at least so far as disclosure that bonuses were paid if the company is publicly quoted (it will likely have to be disclosed to shareholders) or if public money is involved.

Whilst there is a culture of 'heads must roll' when manifest failure is uncovered, often the failure is more systemic and cultural than being down to specific wrongdoing on the part of executives. My understanding with Crossrail is that there was a strong culture of "we will deliver on time" that managers at all levels kept delivering positive reports even in the face of growing evidence that they could not possibly do so. There was also the problem of what appears to have been inadequate scrutiny of progress reports by TfL and possibly also the DfT. When the whole mess was uncovered, it is no surprise that securing agreement of the executives that presided over failure to step aside quickly and cleanly was prioritised over disputing their remuneration including payment of bonuses. Deparating executive remuneration was a tiny sum compared to the money that would have been wasted by any further delay in getting the project back on track.


One of my university law tutors was a solicitor who did contentious contract and tort work - mostly representing individuals bringing claims that were in dispute, not big corporate stuff. He always reminded us that you have to have a clear idea of what you want when you go to law, and that to a certain extent both sides have lost once the situation "goes legal" because any past relationships are damaged, potentially irreparably, and you might have set things on a path that will involve considerable legal costs and delay. Whilst there is something that feels right intuitively about holding failed executives to account through dismissal without bonuses, it isn't hard to see why securing clean transition without any risk of creating legal dispute is perhaps more important to a business.
 

whoosh

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Seems to be a bit Edinburgh Tram-like in its delays and target fiddling financial handlings!
 

hwl

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It's not just the pay and bonuses to the executives. The whole of the basic contract sum was paid out (because now we are having to find lots of extra money to get to completion) and yet the work had not been finished. Somewhere along the line things were being marked up as finished, which meant money was paid out, when this can now be seen to be patently false.

These are by no means unknown issues with the big bucks swilling around on large construction projects, and everyone on completion bonuses, which is why there is a whole discipline of Contract Auditors to identify these things. Where are they in all this?

It was obvious things weren't going to end well:
The amounts paid out to contractors where several % ahead of the % work completed in the project reports and disputed amounts were being reported up to a year later hence the real amount spent at a point in time was upto 10% ahead of % work completion.
The last bit of virtually all Crossrail tasks will involves some painful protracted snagging or rework hence another above average cost.

The (temporary) tracklaying saga to make target and get paid only to have to come back and do it properly and delayed other works even more is from the "you couldn't make it up" category.
 

Nicholas Lewis

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I've got a lot of time for Bob Mortimer - sorry Mark Wild - since he took over Crossrail in 2019, so this is definitely not a criticism of him and his team since they took over, but looking at the latest (February 2020) station progress videos on YouTube some stations, especially Whitechapel, are still building sites, and most stations are still PPE zones, so how the heck could the previous Crossrail team maintain the charade (until they were "invited to stand down") that Crossrail was going to open in 2018 - or even 2019? It was impossible for them not to know this was never going to happen - and this also goes for TFL and Mayor of London - with each of them maintaining some kind of stand off waiting for the other to go public and take the flak - must have gone on for nearly a year, with project meetings simply updating RAG status reports and executives keeping their heads down. That is now all history. The problem is that the project directors and executives slimply slip away to new projects with severances paid up, and bonusses and pensions intact, when the wilful cover up is of such a scale that this should be seen as criminal negligence, or fraud. Is anybody pursuing the personnel concerned for how this happened? I would dearly like to hear that an investigative journalist is doorstepping the former Crossrail Management for explanations, because what I've seen on Youtube is an absolute criminal disgrace and many of the people responsible are actually even richer than if the project had been a success.
Nobodys been held accountable Khan says he annoyed with them but lets them keep all there bonuses on top of the extravagant salaries they were paid. Furthermore Jacobs who were the project representative proved to be totally inadequate at the task they were also paid handsomely for to protect the taxpayer. Below is the press release DofT issued

The Department for Transport (DfT) today announced that it has appointed Jacobs Engineering UK Ltd as the Project Representative for Crossrail following a competitive tender process.
The Project Representative is a team of highly skilled project management professionals who will provide oversight support to the project sponsors (DfT and Transport for London) to ensure that Crossrail Ltd will deliver the project on schedule, within budget and to the agreed standard.

They have comprehensively failed in that task but doubt any monies have been withheld from the account.

The government need to put in place robust employment arrangements for HS2, and other projects, that recognise that high remuneration is required to get the right team but there must a penalty process that is enforceable unlike the current employment contracts where there is no come back for failure.
 

hwl

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Nobodys been held accountable Khan says he annoyed with them but lets them keep all there bonuses on top of the extravagant salaries they were paid. Furthermore Jacobs who were the project representative proved to be totally inadequate at the task they were also paid handsomely for to protect the taxpayer. Below is the press release DofT issued



They have comprehensively failed in that task but doubt any monies have been withheld from the account.

The government need to put in place robust employment arrangements for HS2, and other projects, that recognise that high remuneration is required to get the right team but there must a penalty process that is enforceable unlike the current employment contracts where there is no come back for failure.

Jacobs and KPMG reports were very interesting from 2016 onwards just no one ready beyond the first 20 pages to get to the juicy stuff.
 

Kettledrum

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Jacobs and KPMG reports were very interesting from 2016 onwards just no one ready beyond the first 20 pages to get to the juicy stuff.

Surely the "juicy stuff" should have been highlighted up front in a one page executive summary so Board members would be left under no illusion as to how critical things were.
 

47421

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There is no such thing as criminal negligence in English law other than manslaughter by gross negligence. Other than that exception, negligence is a tort - a civil wrong - not a crime.


There are three offences of fraud, which are found in sections 2 to 4 of the Fraud Act 2006. Of these, the most generally applicable is section 2 fraud by false representation. All three offences have a common mens rea of dishonestly carrying out the fraudulent act intending to make a monetary and/or property gain for themselves or another, to cause another to lose money and/or property, or to cause another a risk of losing money and/or property. Following Ivey v Genting Casinos [2017] UKSC 67, the test for dishonesty is "dishonest by the lay objective standards of ordinary reasonable and honest people" (the second limb of the former Ghosh test is no longer law).

I think it would be a long stretch to turn 'staff members being sucked into the project wide group think that we can get this done, notwithstanding growing evidence that we cannot' into establishing beyond reasonable doubt that 'one or more individuals each made a statement that the project was on track when it wasn't, knowing these statement to be untrue, intentionally exposing the project funders to a risk of loss and that the statement was dishonest in the eyes of lay people'.

The biggest barrier to a fraud prosecution is likely the requirement for intention. An individual making a dishonest statement about progress that they knew could expose the funders to a risk of loss is not enough - legally speaking that is being reckless (knowing of a risk that you go on to take) about exposing funders to a risk of loss. The act must have been intended to expose the funders to a risk of loss for there to be any possibility of fraud.

Further, statements on whether a project is on track would likely be covered by hedges and would likely be made collectively by a group of managers or a board, not a particular individual. The chief executive reporting "It is the opinion of the board of Crossrail Ltd that the project is on target for opening on time, subject to the remaining work proceeding as expected" is a very different thing from one individual stating "Crossrail will open on time".


As anyone who has followed this debacle knows, there are unanswered questions about the scrutiny of Crossrail Ltd's statements by TfL and perhaps also the DfT, which is a further complication.

Any legal remedy the funding bodies might have likely lays in contract law, as this offers wider scope for obtaining damages than tort law. There is a specialist sub-division of the Queen's Bench Division of the High Court known as the Technology and Construction Court that exists to deal with precisely this sort of dispute.

As for individual staff members, what happens on any dismissal by their employer is subject to their contract of employment and employment law.

IIRC Crossrail has raised debt which is tradeable on the stock exchange and they are therefore subject to the criminal law on misleading financial markets. I forget the precise requirements, something about the directors being required to not make public statements that mislead markets in quoted securities. In summer 2018 when the delay was first announced they said central section was expected to open autumn 2019. I was amazed they said this, it seemed obvious that this was at its most generous reckless as it its accuracy, and likely could not be justified under the standard required about not misleading markets. I have some limited professional experience of the stock exchange requirements and legal advice I have seen says directors of companies with quoted securities can only say publicly what they have verified is true or re the future they have every reason to believe will come true. The summer 2018 announcements seemed misleading at the time as has been shown by the reality. I think the directors got away with it because in practice everyone understood that Crossrail’s debts were de facto guaranteed by TfL or DFT and therefore no one actually believed they would default regardless of whether the delay was 9 months or 3 years, and therefore the market in its debt did not really take any notice of what they said, and Financial Conduct Authority or whoever it is who polices the financial markets regulations let it go as they have bigger fish to fry. But this does not change the fact that they statements the directors made in all likelihood were misleading and criminal under the laws on not misleading markets in public securities.
 

djw

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IIRC Crossrail has raised debt which is tradeable on the stock exchange and they are therefore subject to the criminal law on misleading financial markets. I forget the precise requirements, something about the directors being required to not make public statements that mislead markets in quoted securities.

Financial markets law is a specialist area in which I have no training, though I know that you're referring to the offence under section 89 of the Financial Services Act 2012. There is no real doubt now that the statements made were false and there was at least recklessness at the time they were made (which is what matters here) as to their correctness, so the requirement of s. 89(1)(b) of "makes a statement which is false or misleading in a material respect, being reckless as to whether it is" appears to be met. However, s. 89(2) must also be met for an offence to be complete, which is loosely summarised as 'must at least create the possibility of causing someone to do or not do something they otherwise would not have'. If Crossrail Ltd debt is covered by this law, which depends on exactly what has been issued and the definitions found in secondary legislation made under this part of the Act, it is perhaps doubtful that a failure to complete the project on time and on budget affects the risk of, and therefore risks changing investor behaviour towards, already issued debt considering the debt is de facto guaranteed by TfL and DfT, as you noted.

Things would be very different in connection with this offence if Crossrail was a plc whose investors were carrying the project completion risk!
 

Nicholas Lewis

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Financial markets law is a specialist area in which I have no training, though I know that you're referring to the offence under section 89 of the Financial Services Act 2012. There is no real doubt now that the statements made were false and there was at least recklessness at the time they were made (which is what matters here) as to their correctness, so the requirement of s. 89(1)(b) of "makes a statement which is false or misleading in a material respect, being reckless as to whether it is" appears to be met. However, s. 89(2) must also be met for an offence to be complete, which is loosely summarised as 'must at least create the possibility of causing someone to do or not do something they otherwise would not have'. If Crossrail Ltd debt is covered by this law, which depends on exactly what has been issued and the definitions found in secondary legislation made under this part of the Act, it is perhaps doubtful that a failure to complete the project on time and on budget affects the risk of, and therefore risks changing investor behaviour towards, already issued debt considering the debt is de facto guaranteed by TfL and DfT, as you noted.

Things would be very different in connection with this offence if Crossrail was a plc whose investors were carrying the project completion risk!
The lot that wrecked RBS got away with it so not much chance of them doing anything about this lot 18 months on. Khan should have withheld there bonuses and let them fight for it
 

The Ham

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6 Jul 2012
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A good idea in principle, but is it legal ?
I’ve never heard of such practices happening other than CEOs etc of failing companies shamed through public & media pressure into returning or declining bonuses

Even if it's not, then having the clause that payments are only paid once subsequent stages are complete and a percentage is held back until the while project is complete should be used.

In keeping, say, 35% of any bonus until the project is complete it would minimise the amount of extra money needed if things were to go wrong.
 

mrmartin

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17 Dec 2012
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Has there been any update on testing? The stations in the last videos apart from whitechapel and bond Street look mostly complete. But very little news I can see about testing, which is worrying.
 
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