What's likely to have happened with our Northern Rock shares?

Nine_Lives

Warning - this is going to be lacking in information i know. This is my mum asking me, so i'm relaying the information here. You'll have to tell me what extra info you require & i'll then get back to you.

My folks had Northern Rock shares. I asked her how they got them & she said with the mortgage. They went through a broker i believe & somewhere along the line ended up with shares. I know they had both Northern Rock & Norwich Union shares, though i'm not sure/convinced these were related (in how they got them).

Anyway, my mum asked me today what's likely to have happened to them. They never cashed them in.

She's shown me the most recent paperwork she could find regarding it:
It's a tax voucher "in respect of the final dividend paid in the tax year ending 5 April 2008". The "holding" is shown as 500.


What more do you need to know to answer the above & i'll go & find out?

david78

Is this any help

http://www.uksa.org.uk/action/northern_rock

It would seem the shares aren't worth anything now.

YorkshireBoy

Some reading to be going on with whilst you wait for further replies...

http://www.google.co.uk/#hl=en&sclient=psy-ab&q=northern%20rock%20shareholders%20compensation%20scheme&oq=&gs_l=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_qf.&fp=cd9ad4ffbc62c8b2&biw=1366&bih=548&pf=p&pdl=300

Re the NU shares, I got mine years ago as an endowment policy holder when they floated*. Maybe your parents did too?

Only kept them a matter of weeks and made a tidy profit (I was so convinced at the time they were a good bet I dipped into my overdraft facility and bought some (20%?) discounted additional shares as well).

* I don't remember when exactly, but it was around the time of the Halifax floatation IIRC?

Nine_Lives

Yeah i remember my dad talking about endowment policies, so perhaps that's where he/they got it from. I'm pretty sure they never cashed either in.

If i remember right, didn't they do ok for a bit before dropping rapid?

opinions4u

Northern Rock ran out of money and was nationalised. Shares worthless.

Norwich Union are now called Aviva. They're still trading.

http://www.aviva.com/investor-relations/contacts/shareholder-contacts/

Nine_Lives

Yeah that'll be what she's getting paid out for then. Hell fire them things have dropped. I remember when they first got those shares they were worth a nice amount. Think her payout is something like £40 now or whatever it is. Pretty terrible.


As for Northern Rock, from reading it seems that there's pretty much naff all she can do about it. She's lost all the value & it's a case of tough, should've cashed them in.

You live & learn.

fuzzgun19

My husband had a small amount of Northern rock shares, we moved house but forgot to change the address with the shares.

Is it still worth trying to change the address, or would we be wasting our time?

thenudeone

The company was nationalised (ie. the government took ownership of the shares) and an independent valuer was appointed to calculate how much the previous owners should get for them.
The valuer decided that since the bank was insolvent (i.e. its liabilities exceeded its assets), the shares were worthless.
This was confirmed by the courts but some people are still fighting to get "compensation" http://www.sunderlandecho.com/news/business/northern-rock-small-share-holders-still-fighting-for-compensation-1-5665186
This is the nature of shareholding - shareholders share all of the profit but they are the last to get paid if there's trouble.

In summary - the company and the shares are worthless so no point in trying to change the address for your now non-existent shareholding.

dengrainger

I am one of the 'some people' fighting, still, for compensation ( technically we are no longer after compensation but rather restitution) for the lost property value the former Rock shareholders lost when their shares were expropriated by the Labour government in February 2008.

On the back of this theft of the property of some 150,000 small shareholders, mainly pensioners many in the NE of England, the government is set to profit by over £10 Billion after loans, charges and interest at penal rates have been repaid.

Our arguments at the time were that the Rock was NOT insolvent, had unfair restrictions placed (deliberately) on the Valuer, and was treated so differently from other, bigger banks (one of whom had £61 Billion of taxpayer lending , in secret, and yet shareholders still retain their shares. And the Rock did not fiddle Libor, unlike others).

Recent disclosures of the previously secret Court of the Bank of England minutes confirm that the Rock was indeed solvent, safe to lend to, and could have been subjected to a controlled run-down and still remain solvent. It could have been taken over by other banks, had the thinking behind decision to put huge funding into the whole system just a few weeks later been applied sympathetically to potential mergers or takeover attempts.

Instead the Government decided on emergency legislation to take the Rock for nil cost, thereby in our view robbing the small shareholders who had no say in the matter. Now the huge profits are coming and will continue to come into the Government coffers, a very nice return on their investment in the bank at any look, but even more so since they commandeered the solvent bank for nil cost.

The UKSA website, Norther Rock section will be updated with any developments or progress. I will not give up the fight for fairness and justice for the 'little people'

Search on line. for our appeal for justice to Labour leader Ed Miliband.

Dennis

Glen_Clark

dengrainger wrote: »

The UKSA website, Norther Rock section will be updated with any developments or progress. I will not give up the fight for fairness and justice for the 'little people'

Search on line. for our appeal for justice to Labour leader Ed Miliband.

Dennis

There was a full scale run on the bank when it was take in into public ownership - are you seriously suggesting it could have survived that?
And the 'little people' are the taxpayers who were forced to bail it out, not the Hedge Funds trying to get money off them.
I still had my free B&B shares when they went down through bad overpaid management, but I am not asking the innocent taxpayer for more money. Don't be a bad loser. Move On.

pvt

Glen_Clark wrote: »

There was a full scale run on the bank when it was take in into public ownership - are you seriously suggesting it could have survived that?
And the 'little people' are the taxpayers who were forced to bail it out, not the Hedge Funds trying to get money off them.
I still had my free B&B shares when they went down through bad overpaid management, but I am not asking the innocent taxpayer for more money. Don't be a bad loser. Move On.

Wrong way round - it was taken off the shareholders, without compensation, long after the run on the bank.

Dennis's description of what happened is accurate, and I am another of the "some people".

There are lots of perspectives on what happened, but the thing ex-shareholders are most bitter about is that the government seized our property off us, and said it would compensate us for it's value at the time of seizure. Not a real problem for us given that there were a number of potential "buyers" of the bank at that time offering as much as £2 per share, including, amongst others, Virgin. The government refused to allow any of them to buy it, and decided it would be "better value" for it to be taken into public ownership.

The government then appointed an "independent valuer" to value what the bank had been worth when it was seized. What was quite extraordinary was the government stipulated that the independent valuer had to value the bank on the basis that it had no central bank support for it's temporary liquidity problem, and that it was NOT a going concern. Both of those being manifestly untrue, however they found a valuer (most reputable organisations wouldn't touch the job with a bargepole) who happily complied, set the value at zero on the basis of those rigged presumptions , and trousered their fee for doing so.

Meanwhile the bank has since been sold by the government, ironically to Virgin, and the government has done very nicely out of selling something that (it decided) was valueless and took off shareholders for nothing.

Not that I'm bitter.