enviro

Wolverhampton support services giant Carillion has agreed a pounds 27 million sale of environmental consultancy firm Enviros as it continues its drive to dispose of non-core activities.

Carillion, which inherited Enviros from its pounds 561 million takeover of Alfred McAlpine at the beginning of 2008, is selling the firm to global sciences and project delivery specialist Sinclair Knight Merz, which is based in Australia.

Alfred McAlpine paid pounds 30 million for Enviros in 2007 when it bought the consultancy from the firm's management team who owned it with the backing of private equity group ECI Partners.

In a statement posted on the stock exchange website, Carillion said it would use the proceeds of the Enviros sale to reduce its net borrowing, a move which is in line with its intention to reduce net borrowing at the year end to below the half-year level of pounds 146 million.

Enviros was founded in 1995 as a result of a number of consultancies coming together, including Aspinwall, March and Quantisci.

So, yes, the enviros made some overwrought predictions in the past.

Enviros won the last 20 years of political battles by a notable margin, but you'd never know it from their public statements.

The notion of formal insider influence is a tempestuous one to enviros. Should environmental groups ever lend support to candidates other than liberal Democrats?

If anything will push the enviros into that descent it is fund-raising.

As Anna Bramwell noted in Ecology in the Twentieth Century, far from advancing a decentralized small-is-beautiful philosophy, the orthodox enviro prescription "involves mass planning and coercion." No degree of ecological exhortation will persuade the typical citizen of America or Western Europe to abandon a heated home, low-cost food, advanced medical care, or any similar reasonable material gain.