Holes underground

摘要

Fittingly for a city that earns its living from the brain-melting complexities of international finance, London is home to one of the most baroque public-infrastructure deals in the world. And like the financial products offered by the City-blamed for contributing to the current global financial crisis-the Public-Private Partnership (ppp) contracts to upgrade the capital's creaking Underground network now look like complicated, costly mistakes.rnChris Bolt, the ppp Arbiter and philosopher-king, has the unenviable task of refer-eeing the contracts, judging the engineering firms' performance and plans against those of a platonically ideal one and deciding who should pay for what.