You remember our story from three weeks ago, “Branson Offers Necker Island as Security for Virgin Bailout“. It was our bit of April Foolery. It was Guido’s way of making the point that at a time when many small business people are on the verge of losing everything, including their homes. In the circumstances any form of taxpayer assistance to Virgin should come first from investors, should be in the form of repayable loans and should be international in line with the ownership. Branson should, we argued, have to put up his home. Because anything less would be taking the taxpayers for fools…

Incidentally as a result of the article we had some correspondence with Virgin’s corporate PR department. Today in an open letter on his company blog Richard Branson pledged to put up Necker Island as collateral:

As with other Virgin assets, our team will raise as much money against the island as possible to save as many jobs as possible around the Group.

Another Guido policy-into-action success…