Rock On

Since I’m not a Northern rock shareholder, I wasn’t at yesterday’s EGM in Newcastle’s Metro Radio Arena – so I’m grateful to Graeme Wearden on the Guardian’s NewsBlog for a blow-by-blow account of the proceedings. A lot of ‘north-east (hurt?) pride’ was on display, he writes, as well as some natty shirting worn by the two hedge fund managers who have made themselves central to the story, Philip Richards of RAB Capital and Jon Wood of SRM. In the chair, trying to get the audience on his side with a joke about having the second toughest job in Newcastle (the worst, of course, being manager of the troubled football club), was Bryan Sanderson, the ex BP executive who was parachuted in after Dr Matt Ridley did the decent thing and resigned.

The essence of today’s drama was a bid by Richards and Wood to take out of the hands of Sanderson’s board the power to issue new shares or sell off significant assets –  in effect, the power to negotiate a private sale of the whole Northern Rock business. Sanderson does not want his hands tied in that way, and analysts have generally taken the view that if Richards and Wood prevail then likely as not, the looming threat of nationalisation of the Rock will become reality even quicker than it might otherwise have done. Sanderson, plus his chief executive Andy Kuipers (who took over from Adam Applegarth), and three other directors appointed after the crash, were all up for re-election at the meeting.

Well, if I had been a shareholder, which way would I have voted? I might have been tempted not to vote to re-elect Sanderson, a burly, uncharismatic friend of New Labour (ex chairman of one of its super-quangos, ‘the Learning and Skills Council’) who has a big corporate CV but is probably best known in the north east as a none-too-successful chairman of Sunderland football club.