Adrian Ringrose bows out as chief executive of Interserve after 14 years at the end of the month, at a time when the shares in this contractor and outsourcer remain at or around an eight-year low. There are a number of areas of difficulty and the picture remains clouded at several of them.
The main error was the disastrous decision to get into building energy-from-waste plants in 2012: a number of the six contracts have gone badly wrong and Interserve has been replaced as contractor on one of them. The company is now out of that market and taking on no new work, at the cost of a writedown of £160 million in the 2016 figures, and while we are assured that this should be