Robert BaconWhen Robert Bacon was asked what he would have to sacrifice because of the financial loss he had suffered from Northern Rock being nationalised with little or no compensation being offered, his reply was his ‘donation to the Labour Party…before he added ‘only joking!’.
More seriously though, having acquired 500 shares at demutualization he quadrupled his holding just after the news of the financial support from the Bank of England leaked out. He wrongly thought that as the book value was higher than when the bank was floated, the shares would once again eventually reflect the bank’s true value. Little did he know what would actually happen to their market value.
He felt that the way the Government handled the whole affair was so bad that he responded by setting up two petitions on the 10 Downing Street website http://petitions.pm.gov.uk both of which received very good support. In just a couple of weeks the petitions grew rapidly and made it to the top 4% of all the petitions on the whole site which then had some 8,300 odd live petitions and also became the 5th most signed in the "Economics & Finance" category.
Meanwhile, despite being well supported petitions, it took the Prime Minister’s office nearly 3 months to respond and in a way which was anodyne and also ignored the main points that were put forward. Robert also wrote to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and Rudi Vis, his local MP. He received no response whatsoever from No.11 and a party agent eventually did little more than acknowledge his letter to the Labour MP.
Robert lives in north London and is a Risk Engineer. He acquired 500 shares from the original de-mutualisation and then bought some on their way down wrongly thinking that as the NAV was higher, that it would all get sorted out in a while... little did he know how it would be sorted!
He is unhappy with the Government's compensation process as he thinks it will a long time for a rigged process to produce well below the NAV.
