Bradford & Bingley Share Discussion Threads

[loganair] 30/1/2016 21:52

LRJ - This is what I find so upsetting about B&B Nationalization, how one minute Richard Pym says everything's OK with B&B, then literally the next minute B&B's deposit book is sold to Santander, the same bank Pym sold Leicester ad Alliance to the rest is Nationalized. Then the next year both parts of B&B are back well into profit.

[loganair] 11/1/2016 19:20

pvb - I'm not saying that B&B was a rosy picture. What I'm saying is that they were not insolvent, instead had a short term liquidity crises bought about by media speculation ("media speculation about the health and future independence of the bank increased and there was a significant increase in the rate of withdrawals of customer deposits,") and therefore a run on the bank as it were and if the Bank of England had provided it with liquidity as they did with other banks then in my good opinion B&B would still be around trading as a profitable company.

Any time Goldman Sachs is mentioned, well then a company is definitely finished or in the case of Greece the country was definitely finished as they have also pretty well trashed Tesco into the ground all for their own profit.

[pvb] 11/1/2016 19:09

But looking back at reports from the time, they don't seem to match your rosy view of the RI:



Also:

[loganair] 11/1/2016 19:00

pvb - Then after the Rights Issue B&B said they now have the second highest tier 1 ratio of any bank and have sufficient funding for the next 18 months. From B&B themselves - "Tier 1 ratio is coming out at 10.1%; and a core Tier 1 ratio of 9.2%."

"The tier one capital ratio ended the H2 2009 period at 12.1% with no additional funding provided since nationalisation." And just 0.27% of mortgage balances in arrears representing just £101mln of a mortgage book of £37bln and made a profit of £79mln plus Santander made over £100mln from the part they bought from B&B.

as Sharw posted - "Completion of £400m Rights Issue; Bradford & Bingley is one of the best capitalised banks in the UK".

And answering my....'The year before B&B reported a good profit and the year after nationalization both the Government owned Mortgage book and the now owned Santander deposit book made huge profits and have continue to make good and increasing profits ever since.'

In my opinion what caused the collapse of B&B was the following, again from B&B themselves - "media speculation about the health and future independence of the bank increased and there was a significant increase in the rate of withdrawals of customer deposits."

In my good opinion if the Bank of England had provided B&B liquidity for say another 6 months then now B&B would be a profitable bank paying dividends as the two parts of B&B now owned by Santander and HMG are making good profits and providing hansom dividend for these two.

[pvb] 11/1/2016 14:45

loganair 11 Jan'16 - 14:25 - 18613 of 18613

I posted a year before B&B was nationalized that in my good opinion that with in a year Northern Rock, Alliance and Leicester and B&B will no longer exist as it was obvious that the big boys wanted them out of the picture because these 3 ex-building societies were taking to higher percentage share of the mortgage market.

Sadly, that's exactly what happened.

Most of us noticed at the time that something else had happened.

The Rights Issue was fully under written and many share holders took up their rights.

So it all worked out OK then?



B&B was said to have the second highest tier 1 ratio of any bank and were saying they had sufficient funding for the next 18 months so how come just 6 weeks later they had to be nationalized.

So how come they launched a rights issue?

Both HBOS and RBS were far more insolvent then B&B ever was and they got backing from the Government.

B&B wasn't HBOS and RBS. It was a relatively small mortgage bank.

In my good opinion B&B was never insolvent, just had a short term liquidly problem and did not have to be nationalized.

But they couldn't raise the money they wanted.

Get over it.

[sharw] 11/1/2016 14:42

I don't think the rights issue was a cause - although it was only 28% taken up it was underwritten so it was the underwriters who lost out. Indeed, in the interim results published on 29/8/08 the first key point was:

"Completion of £400m Rights Issue; Bradford & Bingley is one of the best capitalised banks in the UK".

[loganair] 11/1/2016 14:25

I posted a year before B&B was nationalized that in my good opinion that with in a year Northern Rock, Alliance and Leicester and B&B will no longer exist as it was obvious that the big boys wanted them out of the picture because these 3 ex-building societies were taking to higher percentage share of the mortgage market.

Sadly, that's exactly what happened.

I agree, that when B&B came with their Rights Issue the people in the know already were a where what was soon going to happen to B&B.

The Rights Issue was fully under written and many share holders took up their rights.

B&B was said to have the second highest tier 1 ratio of any bank and were saying they had sufficient funding for the next 18 months so how come just 6 weeks later they had to be nationalized.

Strange how the CEO of Alliance and Leicester, once the A&L deal with Santander had been announce then became CEO of B&B then just weeks later he sold the deposit book to Santander. The whole thing stinks of fraud by the big banks who the Government colluded with. In my good opinion there can be no other explanation of what happened.

Over 900,000 share holder lost money, including many elderly and pensioners in a company that only once made a loss. The year before B&B reported a good profit and the year after nationalization both the Government owned Mortgage book and the now owned Santander deposit book made huge profits and have continue to make good and increasing profits ever since.

Both HBOS and RBS were far more insolvent then B&B ever was and they got backing from the Government.

In my good opinion B&B was never insolvent, just had a short term liquidly problem and did not have to be nationalized.

Why I keep harping on is that to me, B&B was stolen from its share holders.

[pvb] 11/1/2016 14:00

Do I still hear the sound of dead horses being flogged on this board?

How could B&B rights issue have taken place just before they were deemed insolvent.

Surely the insolvency followed the failure of the RI? And they needed the RI to succeed because otherwise...

The rights issue must have been based on lies, and the money raised went straight from the investors to the government.

What money? They were insolvent. The government sold on the depositors bank in order to protect the depositors. You seem to want the "government", i.e. taxpayers, to cover the shareholder's losses in a failed PLC! It isn't going to happen. If you really don't understand this you should never have been a shareholder. If you need the government to act as guarantor, buy Gilts.

Then they paid some so-called expert to tell us the shares were worth nothing.

Well if the company was insolvent then do you need "experts" to tell you the shares were "worth nothing"?

[tyranosaurus] 11/1/2016 13:44

If Royal Mail had been sold at it`s proper value there would have been enough extra money raised to compensate all B&B shareholders in full.

UK was screwed by the Americans and now they want to be screwed again, this time by Goldman Sachs.

How could B&B rights issue have taken place just before they were deemed insolvent. The rights issue must have been based on lies, and the money raised went straight from the investors to the government.
Then they paid some so-called expert to tell us the shares were worth nothing.

Is there NOT even one UK institution that could arrange a privatisation ???

[optomistic] 06/1/2016 14:11

6 Jan 2016
(ShareCast News) - The Treasury was preparing to offload part of former mortgage lender Bradford & Bingley on Wednesday, in what could be the biggest ever sale of finance assets in the United Kingdom.
Sky News reported that UK Financial Investments, the agency charged with managing the public interest in bailed-out banks, had begun the process of finding advisors to investigate privatising a £17bn loan book.

If a transaction of such a size were to go ahead, it would be significantly larger than the previous biggest disposal - the £13bn offload of thousands of Northern Rock mortgages, announced by the Chancellor in November.

It's understood a document was passed around City banks discussing the idea, though the project was in its infant stages.

One City insider told Sky that it was "a scoping exercise designed to look at these assets, and what the options might be and whether a privatisation might be possible", and nothing further at this stage.

The £17bn loan book was also understood to be separate to the £7.5bn portfolio held by UK Asset Resolution, which George Osborne announced would be sold as part of his Autumn Statement.

Any sale would be some time away, however, as the Northern Rock 'granite' portfolio was still expected to take several months and significant resource. At the time of its announcement, the Chancellor called it a "milestone in clearing up the mess left by the financial crisis".

He also said it was looking like taxpayers would be turning a healthy profit from the bailout, getting more money out of Northern Rock than they put in during the crisis.

Bradford & Bingley was bailed out in September 2008. Its retail deposit assets were swallowed by Santander, while its mortgage and loan books and other assets were held in public ownership.

Official sources were not commenting on the exercise on Wednesday.

[birchin] 31/12/2015 09:25

Bradford & Bingley investors call for probe: Watchdog accused of sweeping bank's collapse and fire sale to Santander under the carpet

By James Salmon for the Daily Mail

Published: 21:55, 21 December 2015 | Updated: 10:15, 22 December 2015



City regulators were last night accused of sweeping the scandal of the Bradford & Bingley collapse under the carpet because of their refusal to launch an investigation into the lender’s downfall.

Shareholders described the failure to instigate a probe as a ‘travesty’.

Tim Lowden, the deputy chairman of the Bradford & Bingley Shareholder Action Group, accused the Government and regulators of burying details of the affair.

He also said the Treasury had ‘stonewalled’ shareholders and not responded to the group’s letters over the years.
Questions: City regulators have been accused of sweeping the scandal of Bradford & Bingley's 2008 collapse under the carpet
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Questions: City regulators have been accused of sweeping the scandal of Bradford & Bingley's 2008 collapse under the carpet

The lobby group has been spurred into action following the publication of a damning report by the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority into the collapse of Halifax Bank of Scotland.

The report, which cost £7million and took more than three years to complete, highlighted the extraordinary failings of the now defunct Financial Services Authority, HBOS’s board and its auditors KPMG to recognise the extent of the bank’s problems.

But it also contained startling details about how the Treasury and the Government discussed a scheme with HBOS to ‘rescue’ B&B. Those plans persisted until just before HBOS itself collapsed.

The delusional idea was abandoned just before B&B was nationalised and HBOS was rescued by Lloyds in September 2008.

B&B’s branches and savings book were sold on the cheap to Spanish-owned bank Santander.

The nationalisation of B&B and the fire sale of its assets was a devastating blow for almost 1m private shareholders and bondholders, who were wiped out.

Many of them were savers when B&B was a building society and received windfall shares after it converted to a bank.

But while hugely expensive inquiries were launched into the demise of HBOS and Royal Bank of Scotland, B&B shareholders are little closer to finding out what happened than they were seven years ago.

Lord Turner, the former chairman of the now defunct Financial Services Authority, promised a full report into the downfall of HBOS in the summer of 2011.

But he also said that it was pointless to investigate the collapse of smaller institutions such as B&B because no lessons could be learned.

The publication of the HBOS report has only served to heighten B&B shareholders’ sense of injustice.

Lowden said: ‘The failure to find out what went wrong and who was to blame is a complete travesty. This scandal has been swept under the carpet.
Demands: Despite frequent calls by shareholder groups for proper compensation and an inquiry into Bradford and Bingley's collapse this never happened
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Demands: Despite frequent calls by shareholder groups for proper compensation and an inquiry into Bradford and Bingley's collapse this never happened

‘The Treasury and regulators seemed to push the misleading impression to the public that Bradford & Bingley was just a small building society up north and so it did not matter too much if it went bust.

‘But a huge number of savers have lost money and deserve to finally learn the truth about what happened.’

The Government appointed accountancy firm PwC in 2010 to determine whether shareholders – who lost between £800 and £1,000 each on average – were due any compensation, but investors were told they would get nothing.

PwC determined that the bank would have fallen into administration without being bailed out, rendering its shares worthless.

But B&B shareholders insist this is not the case and that the lender could have survived without being nationalised, so long as it was given emergency support from the Bank of England.

They have pointed to the lender’s final interim financial results that were published on August 29, 2008 – signed off by auditors KPMG – which described it as ‘one of the best capitalised banks in the UK’.

This echoes the reassurances given by HBOS – also audited by KPMG – shortly before it collapsed. B&B shareholders had been persuaded just weeks earlier to come to its aid and buy £400million of new shares in an emergency rights issue.

[loganair] 19/6/2015 14:31

When I read an article like the one above the whole thing about B&B sounds like Collusion, Goldman Sachs plotted, complicitly conspiring and playing a game with the UK Government to defraud and deceive the 1 million private share holders of B&B for their own greed, self-profit and self-gain.

Goldmans worked with the treasury over the Nationalization of Northern Rock, then worked with Bradford and Bingley, most probably with their Rights Issue as well deceiving the small private share holders out of even more of their wealth.

Jim O'Neil ex-CEO Goldmans, Mark Carney current Governor of the Bank of England ex-Goldmans.

What happened to B&B, the whole things stinks of horrible, smelly, mucky, yucky sewerage.

Look how Goldmans hid so much of the Greek debt to get Greece in to the Euro and now look at Greece it's assets are being liquidated for pennies in the Euro as it were. Goldmans was also involved in transferring debt off the books for Tesco's and now look what trouble Tesco's are also in.

I've noticed when any thing really bad happens in the world either one or more of the following are mentioned Goldman's, Rothchild's or Freshfield's, in collusion with one of the big 4 accountancy firms.

It seems to me that Goldman Sachs now has the power of life and death over any entity it wishes, any company or country it wishes for it's own greedy self-gain and self-profit.

[loganair] 19/6/2015 14:13

Goldman Sachs To Advise UK On Bank Sales:

Goldman Sachs is to advise the Government on the sale of its remaining stakes in Britain's bailed-out lenders at the same time as one of its divisions tries to acquire billions of pounds of bank assets from the taxpayer.

Sky News has learnt that Goldman was hired as the privatisation adviser to UK Financial Investments (UKFI) just days after George Osborne announced that he would begin selling the state's shares in Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) within months.

Goldman's appointment may prove to be controversial given criticism of its role advising the Treasury on the nationalisation of Northern Rock in 2008, and its securities division's interest in buying Granite, a £13bn mortgage portfolio put up for sale by the Chancellor earlier this year.

Underlining the web of relationships managed by investment banks, the Wall Street giant worked with Bradford & Bingley on its attempts to stave off collapse in 2008, and attempted to broker a rescue deal led by TPG - one of the firms that Goldman is now partnering with in an effort to buy the Granite assets.

To add a further layer of complexity, Goldman will be advising UKFI on the sale of its shareholding in RBS, while also competing against RBS as a rival bidder in the Granite auction.

Goldman will replace JP Morgan as UKFI's privatisation adviser, and will assist the Treasury agency with its plans for placing billions of pounds of shares in Lloyds Banking Group and RBS.

Sources said Goldman - like JP Morgan before it - would be paid for its work with UKFI, although that may involve a discount to its usual commercial fee, in line with much of the work done for the Government on asset privatisations in recent months.

The Conservatives committed during the General Election campaign to launching a retail offering of Lloyds shares within 12 months, with bonus shares offered to investors who retain their stakes for a minimum period.

Outlining his plans for RBS in a speech at the City’s Mansion House last week, Mr Osborne described the lender as "the hardest nut to crack", adding:

"I was not responsible for the bailout of RBS or the price paid then for shares bought by the taxpayer: but I am responsible for getting the best deal now for the taxpayer and doing whatever I can to support the British economy.

"There is no doubt that starting to sell the Government’s stake in RBS is the right thing to do on both counts."

The Chancellor pointed to advice from the investment bank Rothschild and Mark Carney, the Bank of England Governor, that further delaying the sale made little sense, even though a disposal of taxpayers' 78% stake in RBS at the current share price would result in a £7bn loss.

Rothschild's report suggested that when fees paid to the Treasury by rescued banks were taken into account, taxpayers could make an aggregate £14bn profit if the remaining stakes in Lloyds and RBS were sold at their current levels.

The appointment of Goldman comes as RBS overhauls its own City relationships, with Bank of America Merrill Lynch expected to replace UBS as one of the taxpayer-backed lender’s corporate brokers.

Jim O'Neil, a respected investment banker who previously ran UKFI, will be among the key figures overseeing the relationship if the move is confirmed.

Spokesmen for both UKFI and Goldman declined to comment on Thursday.

[pvb] 03/5/2015 23:57

pvb - At the time of Nationalisation B&B had one of the highest tier 1 ratios of any bank, they even kept bosting about it and how they had repackaged their mortgages and had sufficient funding to fund new mortgages for at least the next 18 months,

So why did they need extra funding? Why a rights issue? Why did the rights issue fail? Why could nobody be found to buy them?

I'm afraid I get an overwhelming impression of the rewriting of history on this thread.

All the other ex-building societies, ie. Abbey National, Woolwich, Bristol and West, Halifax had already been taken over by various banks.

Quite.

[loganair] 03/5/2015 11:43

pvb - At the time of Nationalisation B&B had one of the highest tier 1 ratios of any bank, they even kept bosting about it and how they had repackaged their mortgages and had sufficient funding to fund new mortgages for at least the next 18 months, then 2 weeks later B&B had be Nationalised with the rest being sold off cheaply to Santander who said they got an excellent deal with the part they took over immediately being earnings enhancing.

B&B has already paid off the money injected into it by the Government and the Government are still raking in many 100's of millions of pounds in continuing profits from B&B.

Silly not to have taken my own advise as I often posted at the beginning of the financial crises that with in a year there would no longer be Northern Rock, Alliance and Leicester and B&B as the major banks and financial institutions did not like these up start ex-building societies taking so much of their business away and therefore wanted rid of them and with-in less than a year these three were no more.

All the other ex-building societies, ie. Abbey National, Woolwich, Bristol and West, Halifax had already been taken over by various banks.

[homeboy35] 02/5/2015 18:38

Ah, I know, pvc,

you sold in Jan 2006 at 530p and made a million pounds!

[pvb] 02/5/2015 17:10

Err... yes, so it has been repaying the government (i.e. taxpayers) loan used in the 'rescue', which is why it still exists in the form it does - now combined with NRAM. Remember, the original rights issue to raise money in the market failed and the government could not find a buyer for the company.

Not quite the spin of a flourishing company that you put on the situation!

[loganair] 02/5/2015 16:41

pvb - The part that was Nationalised has been profitable ever since, making a couple of billion pounds for the government in profit as has the branch network sold to Santander.

[pvb] 02/5/2015 16:35

It doesn't surprise me that you had shares in B&B, pvb, and were stitched up like a kipper by the corrupt financial sector of the UK

While I did have at one time, homeboy, I had sold them a long time before 2008.

So, you are wrong again. As ever! ;-)

Trouble with you, homeboy, is you are for ever jumping to conclusions. The wrong ones...

[pvb] 02/5/2015 16:32

How can it have been "highly profitable ever since", when it ceased to exist in 2008?

[loganair] 02/5/2015 16:30

My thought has always been 55p which was the Rights Issue price, just 6 only weeks before it being Nationalised which I think is fair and reasonable and up to the first 10,000 thereby giving the small share holders the priority.

I've also felt that the small share holders are given the priority as there were over 900,000 of them, many of them the granny brigade not the large institutions and hedge funds who were trying to make a mint out of the troubles and temporary difficulties B&B were in.

Apart from a short term liquidity problem I agree B&B was a going concern as has been highly profitable ever since, just having the one single year it made a loss, the year it was Nationalised.