It was all going so well. An investor in Stobart Group in the spring of 2016 would by this time last year have tripled their money.
What was not to like? Stobart owned Southend airport, a southeastern hub whose growth is likely to be exponential because every other London gateway is as good as full. It is also a distributor of woodchip, offcuts that are being used by incinerators and considered renewable because they burn biomass. And it has a civil engineering contracting arm for Network Rail, the state-owned keeper of the railway network whose £8 billion-a-year maintenance and upgrade work is the equivalent of repainting the Forth Bridge — a job that will never be finished.
Oh, and then there is a legacy stable