If I recall the story correctly, the government sold at a price that had been suggested to them by many highly paid financial services consultants. The fact tha

If I recall the story correctly, the government sold at a price that had been suggested to them by many highly paid financial services consultants. The fact that the pricing was wrong may or may not have been avoidable, but one of the basic arguments for privatisation is that it's hard to get and keep competent civil servants, so the fact that the final act of privatisation itself is often screwed up is not supposed to be very surprising. Just think how often pricing decisions were screwed up before!