The London Stock Exchange is in serious trouble

It has impeccable green credentials. It is crucial to the country’s power grid. And it is one of the UK’s largest private companies. A floatation of Octopus Energy should have been just the kind of event that would give the London Stock Exchange a much needed boost. And yet it now emerges that it may well choose a rival market to list its shares. If that happens, it will accelerate the City’s decline into global irrelevance – and an incoming Labour government may well finish it off. 

It is probably the worst news the London market could have had. The chief executive of the giant Octopus Energy, the largest electricity supplier in the UK, revealed today that the company might list elsewhere. ‘If we ever were to IPO, it’s not obvious it will be London’, the company’s founder and chief executive Greg Porter told the financial newsletter Semafor. It might choose New York, or somewhere else entirely.