We have had a very successful week for our campaign and numbers have been growing rapidly. A full update can be found on our website here in addition to this message.

Within the last four days we have doubled our signatories again from 1500 to 3000! This is impressive given where we were a few weeks ago. It would also not have been possible without all those supporting this petition and the journalists who have written about this petition and campaign.

Awareness of our campaign has been raised by a number of press articles, in particular by the Standard and my own article which was also published in the Standard this week. In addition we received radio coverage on BBC Scotland as I was interviewed on their Lunchtime Live program. I was also booked to appear on another BBC radio program, but it was cancelled at the last minute due to developments in Israel.

You can see my article in the Standard here, and another two here:

Campaign against Nationwide's £2.9bn Virgin Money takeover puts pressure on board

Court case could disrupt Nationwide's takeover of Virgin Money — let's hope it does

Please pass these on to anyone you know!

Nationwide management themselves also seem to have realised that this campaign is now gathering momentum and is not something they can totally ignore. In the middle of this week they began contacting members who had written to them about holding a special general meeting, either to have a phone call with
them or sending them a template email trying to sell the deal again with a few platitudes.

Nationwide are still failing to provide any substantive answers to any questions formally asked of them and we can only assume that they hope they can continue to ignore answering detailed questions and ride out the storm.

Given that Nationwide management are not interested in truly listening to members, it is suggested that anyone with savings considers moving all their money except £100 (to preserve voting and membership rights) to another bank or building society paying a better a better rate of interest. We now know why Nationwide do not come close to any best buy savings rates - it is so management get build up money to spend on other things like buying Virgin Money rather than offering their existing members the best returns that the society could afford to give.

This is not the time to give up though. Despite what has been written in some media outlets, this deal is not a done deal and still needs to get Virgin Money shareholder and ultimate court approval. These steps could take until around October to happen. During this time we have plenty of opportunities available to get Nationwide to reconsider. As our known numbers are rapidly growing, we will hopefully soon be in a position where we will have the numbers to have a meaningful impact on the outcome of any votes at the Annual General Meeting. Once the proposed resolutions are published, we will study them and see how we can vote for maximum effect and send a strong message to the management that their approach needs to change.

We have also reached a stage where the work of handling supporters questions and updating all our information is taking up quite a bit of time. I would appreciate hearing from anyone who might be willing to help with anything we have to do. Please email me directly at mikael@lexgreen.com if you would like to make contact.

We now have a much improved and updated website thanks to the efforts of volunteers assisting with this campaign. For much more information about further actions you can take and everything happening behind the scenes, please visit our website here.

Thanks to everyone who has signed and supported this campaign and please keep on passing on the word to get our message across. We still have opportunities available to potentially force a vote and everything is still to play for.

Kind regards,

Mikael