In today’s Sunday Times there is an article on the giant engineering conglomerate, Aecom. The article talks about the company’s desire to move away fron simple engineering consultancy and towards becoming a “one stop shop” for construction” too. For example, a representative of the company now sits on the Mayor of London’s planning advisory committee working on projects such as Crossrail 2.

Now Aecom has createc Aecom Capital which is prepared to take equity in clients’ projects. It wants to “plan, design, build and operate infrastructure assets around the world”.

The “embedded” or “non-embedded” member of staff/consultant (depending on your view) Relocation Manager at EDDC who has worked for so long on the aborted Skypark project, works for (or doesn’t work for, depending on your view) Davis Langdon – owned by Aecom.

So, you have the interesting situation of a company both giving supposedly impartial advice whilst offering partnership investment and ” one stop shop” services in the projects they are supporting/ promoting/ impartially reporting on.