The shocking news that Bradford & Bingley's 940,135 shareholders have had their entire investment seized and confiscated by the Government raises a number of serious but unanswered questions.
FIRST: was B&B's chief executive Richard Pym deliberately misleading shareholders or simply catastrophically wrong when he said on Thursday last week that the bank was "strongly capitalised" and that he was planning to put its problems behind it and "have a business which is fit for purpose going forward"?
That reassurance from the man who above all others should have known the truth about B&B was sufficient for people like me to buy shares in the bank.
Yet by the end of the following business day, Friday, rumours were already circulating that the bank might be nationalised.
As nothing had materially changed in B&B's circumstances in the intervening period, it is incredible that the same bank said by Mr Pym to be strongly capitalised and fit for purpose was judged only hours later to be so precarious that it needed nationalising as a pre-emptive measure.
SECOND: why weren't shareholders consulted over B&B's future? Why was there no Extraordinary General meeting or even any kind of cummunication between the company and its shareholders?
THIRD: what does Gordon Brown mean when he says, as if by way of an afterthought, that shareholders in B&B will be compensated "in due course"?
Could he be referring to the same sort of procedure that has so far seen no Northern Rock shareholders receive a penny?
FOURTH: if it takes, say, a year for the dust to settle before it can be calculated how much, if anything, shareholders might receive in compensation for having their bank stolen from them, will the Government send in a team of highly-paid accountants to spend that year running up exorbitant fees that would eat away at any money that might have come to shareholders - or will it wait for the year to be up and then send them in, at which point they could probably calculate the answer, even allowing for a long lunch-break, within a working day?
FIFTH: as there are almost a million B&B shareholders and I seem to be the only one whose voice has been heard through being quoted in stories in just about every national newspaper in the UK, are the others just going to lie down and take this without a fight?
We may have lost any power we allegedly had as shareholders, but we do represent one sixtieth of the population and a statistically significant chunk of the electorate at the next election.
We deserve to be heard.
Jon McKnight
Author of Sort The Bastards!
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