Bradford & Bingley is holding its extraordinary general meeting today in Sheffield, where its long-suffering investors will be asked to approve its bungled £400m cash call.
With the share price languishing at just 52p today, this is their chance to hold the troubled lender to account.
Refresh and scroll down for updates
8.30am:
The M1 southbound at Sheffield is as slow as the property market. But suddenly there's a gap. A quick slip left, then past Meadowhall and the Titan steelworks where 100 years ago you could buy a complete Dreadnought battleship off the peg.
And here we are at the Sheffield Arena, with sober green billboards advertising the Bradford & Bingley special meeting.
There are more security guards than punters at the moment - the sort who look as if they ought to be wearing the B&B's trademark bowler hat. The sort that Oddjob had in Goldfinger, with a steel rim.
8.45am:
There is fierce scrutiny of the media. Absolutely no cameras or recording devices. Fingers crossed that I'll be able to keep in touch ...
I wish I could report a change from the drizzle which seems to mark these big financial crisis meetings. But no. A sort of inland sea mist has enveloped the 200-odd cars so far here in Car Park B. Actually as I write these words it's starting to lift.
Will the shareholders do the same for the B&B?
9am:
As the meeting starts dead on time, chairman Rod Kent must be grateful to be sitting in Yorkshire and not Karachi - where hundreds of angry investors stoned the Pakistan stock market in protest at falling share prices.
Kent kicks things off by apologising for the time and place to a cavernous hall with a somewhat lonesome-looking audience no more than 300 strong. Yes, he said, Sheffield was a grisly place to get to for shareholders from the society's West Yorkshire heartland. I can vouch for that after creeping through three rush hours from home - Leeds, Bradford and then Sheffield itself.
Then there was the timing, exactly coinciding with the morning rush. Sorry again said Kent. But we need the day to count the votes and sort things out with lawyers and financial regulators. Then he was off after introducing Chris Wilford, the embattled finance director and the rest of the board.
Absentees were the non-execs, including Lady Patten, who hadn't been able to make it up north.
9.15am:
We're on a potted history at the moment, with just one bit of emotion in Kent's calm tones, when he chronicled the sudden ill health of former chief exec Steven Crawshaw in June. He was out of action straight away, said Kent. The hall sat listening in glum silence.
9.20am:
We're into understatement time now. Kent acknowledges to a ripple of nods: "The process of raising capital has not been a very comfortable or easy one for Bradford and Bingley."
This had not been very comfortable for shareholders. Indeed, today's meeting is third time lucky after two previous attempted EGMs were scuppered by last-minute collapses in the board's money raising plans.
Fortunately adds Kent - irresistibly reminiscent of Baldrick in Blackadder - the board "had the foresight to have a contingency back-up plan". He then riffs through the wider gloom engulfing the whole banking and property field, arguing that things may have been bad for the B&B but where aren't they bad? He reels off rivals, and the troubles they have been having. The mortgage market is cyclical. Good times will come again. Hang on, hold fast, and other Yorkshire aphorisms.
The new chief executive comes up next. No name yet - as expected - but Kent says: "Our search will be greatly helped by a positive vote today." He faces a bit of a task in the hall itself judging by comments from small shareholders going in.
I spoke to one fellow traffic jam sufferer from Bingley itself who said tersely, before scooting through the Oddjobs: "I've come to find out why they've made a mess of things." Another gent on a bicycle was only slightly kinder: "It's hard times, but they shouldn't have got it so wrong."
9.30am:
We're into questions now. First up, a Mrs Jones who announces herself as "representing myself". In the classic manner of David and Goliath, she says: "There's been too many things gone wrong" and wants an assurance that this will stop. Kent is all humility. "I take your words to heart," he says. No excuses, really, other than the fact that you need luck in business and B&B hasn't had it.
Next, another small shareholder Sharon Pegg raises the predictable subject of fat cat bonuses. Will board members or senior staff have bonuses this year, she asks. No, says Kent. They won't.
Now a big beast: the man from Standard Life, which has 30m shares, 5% of the equity. SL is one of the Big Four institutional investors and Kent gets an immediate assurance that it will vote in favour of all today's resolutions.
But his tone is full of reproof, and though he makes a point of praising B&B's rank-and-file staff, he wants guarantees on pre-emption rights [where shareholders are offered any new issue of shares before the shares are offered to non-shareholders]. There's just a touch of menace here.
Kent is straight back, as with his apology to Mrs Jones and the bonuses. He gives the assurances on pre-emption immediately. He also picks up the praise of his footsoldiers and echoes it.
9.35am:
One more questioner - another small shareholder but one who knows his stuff - retired stockbroker Peter Hepworth. He feels let down by over-optimistic comments Kent made at the last annual general meeting. Knowledgeable stuff. More apologies. Then ... silence.
I do a quick headcount meanwhile after realising that at least a fifth of the people scattered round the cavernous hall are media. There are only just over 100 shareholders. Oh dear, another of the mistakes Mrs Jones was on about. You could have held 20 meetings this size in the space they'd booked.
9.40am:
And now we've got to the votes - a full hour earlier than Kent predicted. Five of them, taken one by one. All in favour: silently, the institutions and absentees will be voting unanimously in favour.
It's not quite the same in the hall. One small pocket of shareholders in particular solidly votes No to everything. But the cards held up in favour have a big majority each time. Something like 949,900 small shareholders may not have made through the drizzle and the traffic jams, but the ones here have done their stuff.
9.45am:
The small shareholders don't seem inclined to linger for the buns and coffee which B&B have laid on. Nothing lavish, but I've just snatched a very pleasant orange juice. There'll be a press conference shortly, but for now that's it.
10.20am:
Just back. I just caught a couple of contrasting questioners before they headed off into what has now become full-blown rain.
Mrs Jones turns out to be Sylvia Jones, a home carer from Rotherham, whose real beef is that she's had what she considers poor treatment from local B&B branches. "We got a mortgage more than 40 years ago when they first opened a branch in Rotherham," she says. "But I've been tret that badly, they've sent me to Coventry."
This turns out to be literally true. Mrs Jones still has her shares - which is why she's here - but she's transferred her savings account to the Coventry Building Society.
Standing beside her in the shelter of the porch is Guy Jebb, the man from Standard Life. He doesn't want to go beyond what he said at the meeting, other than risking mild optimism if the board sticks to its course and the rights issue goes as planned. He repeats his relief about pre-emption - the right of existing shareholders to have first go at the new offer.
10.30am:
I also had a word with another cycling shareholder, Geoff Wade from Wickersley in Sheffield. A bit of a pedal in the rain, and he's wishing he'd known what the weather was going to do in advance. This gets us chatting about B&B wishing the same thing, but as regards market trends. "I think they'll come out of it alright. They're basically sound," says Geoff, who was a butcher before he retired. "There's been a lot of hype, and these days that has an effect on share values and it's made things seem worse than they are."
Kent is coming up for his press conference in a sec, after doing the TV interviews first. He's preceded by a B&B staffer who's helpfully researched for the media and found out that the Arena hall can hold 12,000. So they could have fitted 120 EGMs in here, rather than 20.
10.45am:
Kent's patiently working his way through his press conference now. He confirms that he has already interviewed several candidates for the chief executive's job, with more to come. He's clearly looking forward to ending his temporary role as chief exec as well as chairman, which he took on when Steven Crawshaw resigned. "It wasn't a career move for me," he says wryly, adding that he has plenty of other business interests he enjoys.
Resigning as chairman as well, then, when the new chief exec is in place? He won't say, other than that the matter would go to the board and he would do what was right. What would be right? You can't tell this far ahead, he says.
Are predators prowling around - with Spanish bank Santander taking over Alliance & Leicesterafter previously buying Abbey National? "We would have to say, if there had been approaches," says Kent. Those are the rules, and since he doesn't say, there have clearly been no new bids.
11am:
Our friends over at Alphaville have tallied up the audience, and the turnout is even worse than we thought. They make it 56 shareholders, 22 security guards, 15 reporters, between 40 and 50 B&B staff, and three PRs (or "felts") from Finsbury.
11.15am:
The full voting results have just come in, while Kent carries on answering minor questions.
Resolution 1, authorising the rights issue, involved 240,119,256 shares, of which 223,776,317 were cast in favour with 7,013,552 against and 9,324,637 withheld. That's a 93.2% vote in favour, with 6.8% failing to support the rights issue by either voting against or abstaining.
There's a much bigger revolt against Resolution 5, which would give directors the power to use the new shares to pay the dividend, rather than handing out cash. 204,270,309 shares were cast in favour, 29,183,387 against and 6,548,881 withheld. So nearly 15% of B&B's shareholders refused to support it.
Kent then deals with final queries about the cavernous seating for his small meeting. "I like a lot of people to turn up," he says. "I wish more had." An aide chips in that the attendance was about the same as at a routine AGM. "But this wasn't exactly routine," responds one of the reporters. Kent smiles. "I must admit, when I was on the platform, looking at the size of the place, I wondered what it would be like to be up there playing an electric guitar."
11.30am:
And that is really it. My colleagues in London will bring you full reaction to the vote, plus photos and audio from the event. Thanks for reading.
