I had a look at that Clubman and it does appear that the shareholders lost their investments but there was a compensation scheme set up by the UK treasury under which an independant valuer would "assess" any compensation payable to shareholders. What that transpired to be (if anything) I do not know as the correspondence was to be between the shareholder and the valuer. On Northern Rock though, I thought it was nationalised in order to stop the run on deposit withdrawl increasing it's loan to deposit ratio beyond allowed limits ? If so, presuming the bank was otherwise healthy, would it not still have a net worth ?