Page 94, the Private Eye podcast.

Hello and welcome to another episode of Page 94.

My name is Andrew Hunter Murray, and this week we have two stories about the fabric of

British life today. The first takes us to the northeast to T-side, where there have been some

extremely interesting goings on, to do with something called a free port. If you haven't

heard of a free port, get used to that word because you're going to be hearing lots more of it

over the next half an hour, and after that we're going to have Tim Minogue, who has been looking

in the southeast of the country at some other interesting business decisions that have been made,

particularly those going on in the London Borough of Croydon, which is now flat broke and very,

very keen for a government bailout. Tim will be telling us all about the London Borough of Croydon,

and it's absolutely awful finances in a little bit. But first we go northeast to T-side.

Richard Brooks has been covering the very tangled and murky story of the T-side free port

for many months now. He's actually written a special report for private eye all about it,

and so it's high time that we got him into the studio and asked exactly what it's going on there.

It's a story that's still being uncovered, but it has absolutely everything in it. It has

hundreds of millions of pounds of money sloshing unaccountably around. It has large amounts of

scrap metal. It has industrial chemicals. It has the endorsement of the Prime Minister himself.

So here is Richard Brooks. I started off by asking him the simple question, what is a free port?

Here's Richard. Free port is a special area that has a lot of tax advantages,

principally customs duties. The idea is that a free port area isn't treated as part of the country

that is in for customs purposes. So you move stuff in and out without it being considered as

the stuff actually coming into the country. Right. Just to make sure I'm understanding it properly.

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