ATM | associacao de investidores

Caros consócios,

No seguimento do caso do Banco Northern Rock, contamos com a colaboração da nossa congénere no Reino Unido, a UK Shareholders Association (UKSA) que nos fez chegar o seguinte update.

Northern Rock Shareholders Action Group - Update No. 28

Last week a committee of the House of Commons, and the Lords, debated the Northern Rock Compensation Order. This is the regulation which will be used by the UK Government to establish the value of compensation to be offered to shareholders - it can be seen on the internet at: www.opsi.gov.uk

We asked our supporters to contact their members of Parliament to express their concerns on the terms of this Compensation Order and thanks to the many who did. We also made direct representations to the committee members.

In general terms the view of most politicians in these debates (from all political parties) seemed to be that the Government was right to restrict the compensation payable to shareholders, primarily on the principle that taxpayers should not be paying more, and that most shareholders were short term speculators anyway. Of course the latter was not true but unfortunately this is an allegation that has been repeatedly made in the press. There seemed to be little sympathy for the rights of shareholders, or the morality of expropriating their property without fair compensation. Even the Conservative politicians seemed to concentrate on raising technical points about the issue rather than attacking the Government’s actions directly, presumably in fear that they would seen as supporting a bail out of those “hedge funds” who had holdings in Northern Rock. This is of course a reference to SRM and RAB, and regrettably “hedge funds” are regularly demonised in the media for various reasons.

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Caros consócios,

Em face de alguns pedidos sobre a situação do Banco Northern Rock, solicitamos a colaboração da nossa congénere no Reino Unido, a UK Shareholders Association (UKSA) que regularmente nos tem feito chegar informações sobre o processo que envolve este banco e o governo britânico.

Sempre que oportuno informaremos os nossos associados sobre novos desenvolvimentos.

Para já disponibilizamos a última informação obtida por parte da UKSA.

Legal Action Being Pursued

As I said in the previous note that we issued (all past notes are on the Northern Rock page of our web site at: www.uksa.org.uk/NorthernRock, we are continuing to look into the legal issues with a view to challenging the Government so as to obtain fair compensation.

Although the Government is setting up an independent valuation of the shares which have been confiscated from you, they have set the terms of reference so that you will not get a fair and unbiased figure. Because of the terms of reference, the answer will almost certainly be very little of nothing, when Northern Rock was in essence a valuable business that will soon recover from its difficulties.

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