How would it trickle down to the tax payers? Would they get rebates on council tax?
Everybody keeps saying it will be detrimental to the council tax payers and they will lose out, but how will they?
Probably depends on how people are defining losing out. I see what you mean, assuming the council aren't out of pocket (ie: the loan get paid back) then if SISU were handed the Ricoh tomorrow you wouldn't see your council tax bill go up or down or anything change. I guess that some people are talking about tax payers losing out as they no longer own an asset (not sure that has any real impact, if the council owned an office building and gave it to someone would anyone care?) or they are talking about future potential income.
Can't remember any details without looking them up but there was a council round here that recived a windfall from something and everyone got a huge discount on their council tax one year but really in the long term I don't think taxpayers are impacted one way or the other. A windfall from a sale would be a one off and will the profits year to year ever be that big that it has a noticeable impact on each resident of the city?
So people can make an argument that taxpayers lose out but if that's the only point to their arguement to me I don't think it really stands up to much in the grand scheme of things.
Of course the other thing to consider is if legally the council would be allowed to just handover an asset to the likes of SISU, think that may be a bigger issue.