The main reason was because my private pension plans had degenerated into nothing but also because we are all supposed to spread our financial risk. In August, B&B asked its shareholders if we would
support their £400m rights issue. After some careful thought, I decided to take up that offer and bought a few more shares. So in total I now
had just under 12,000 shares.

My thinking at the time was simply to have the dividends re-invested and perhaps, just perhaps, over 20 years or so it might add up to generate a little extra income for my retirement. Now, less than eight weeks later, that £400m and all my shares have vanished.

To say I feel cheated is an understatement.

How can it be possible to have such a vast sum of money disappear virtually overnight? I know when you invest in stocks you take a risk that the business in question might fail and therefore you may lose your money.

But in the case of B&B it had not gone bankrupt. In fact, it
had proven cash reserves including the £400m from its recent rights issue as well as access to the Treasury's temporary equity line of £40bn. Its new chief executive, Richard Pym, was also aggressively working to cut out a lot of the dead wood that was damaging the business.

He had already managed to re-negotiate the awful deal with GMAC to buy junk US mortgage notes. That would have been a saving to B&B of nearly £1bn through to the end of 2009 when the contract expired. Lots of other cost cutting measures and house cleaning was taking place and I felt reasonably confident that B&B would have survived through the credit crunch or perhaps have been seen as a more attractive buy out from a bigger bank.

Whether B&B would have eventually gone bankrupt is actually neither here nor there. The fact remains that the Government took it upon itself to become involved in the company's affairs over the weekend, alleging that it had to act now based on information it had received from the Financial Services Authority that a run on B&B was either happening or going to happen.

I am not opposed to a temporary period of public ownership provided the
taxpayer does not end up footing the bill. What the Government is doing with Northern Rock, for example, is reasonable. Keeping it in public ownership until it can both repay the Treasury (and therefore the taxpayer) and be able to stand on its own two feet is a sensible way to proceed so why couldn't the Government do the same with B&B?

Of course, as a taxpayer I don't want my taxes being used to prop up any business unless there are safeguards in place to ensure my money is repaid. That will happen with Northern Rock and it could have happened with B&B. What the Government should have done is take B&B national and hold onto it until the books started looking healthier then return it to private ownership, in other words return it to the shareholders but only when the cost to the public has been recouped.

Of course, this might have taken many years to achieve but at least shareholders would not have had all their investment wiped out. It would have been a win-win situation for the economy in general, the taxpayers and shareholders.

I cannot understand why this Government did not act earlier after the run on Northern Rock caused it to be nationalised. The Chancellor has had nearly a year to increase the compensation level from £35,000 pounds to something higher. That simple measure alone would have staved off any run on B&B. This Government either does too little too late or too much too soon. In the case of B&B it did the latter, it over-reacted and gave in to Santander's demands to slice off the best parts, the deposit accounts.

It now seems inevitable that B&B will not enjoy many more days as a high street name. At the end of the day it strikes me that no matter how strong a bank is, if the rumour mongers start a whispering campaign, its days are numbered.

Perhaps that is the warning sign we all need to watch out for and perhaps that is one area of regulation the Government should take a close look at in addition to making short selling illegal.

Gary Evans is a small shareholder in Bradford & Bingley.