It usually takes years for shareholders to discover how much value has been destroyed by an ill-conceived merger. For investors in BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto, the bills have arrived much more quickly.

BHP yesterday admitted that the fees for its failed bid were an astonishing £291 million, while Rio is estimated to have shelled out more than £100 million. On top of that, there is the intangible, but perhaps more important, cost of management time on both sides.

Unsurprisingly shareholders are unhappy, and they are particularly unhappy with Marius Kloppers.

Mr Kloppers, who had been BHP's chief executive for just one month before revealing his interest in Rio last November, showed absolute confidence that the bid would succeed, right until the last.

In the event, it was scuppered by a combination of regulatory concerns and the slump in metals prices. Yet, Mr Kloppers had brushed aside the possibility that European competition authorities would demand big asset sales as the price of approving the deal. He also dismissed the possibility that the commodity price bubble would burst. The takeover was a “deal for all seasons”, he declared. But clearly not for the economic winter we have just entered.

Faced with the prospect of having to sell iron ore assets for which there are now no buyers, Mr Kloppers threw in the towel.

For Rio, there are further costs. Some shareholders believe Tom Albanese, Rio's chief executive, would not have taken on so much debt had he not been fighting off Mr Kloppers. Rio is now left with a £24 billion debt mountain, a large chunk of which has to be refinanced within 12 months.

Despite Rio's protestations, some investors fear it may need to raise money through a rights issue in the next year.

Those shareholders in both companies that opposed the deal are now feeling aggrieved, if vindicated.

The big winners are the banks, including Citigroup, that had pledged to provide $55 billion (£35.4 billion) of financing that they can now ill afford. They are off the hook having pocketed an estimated $75 million in fees.

The advisers on both sides have also done very nicely. But there is unlikely to be much celebration. The failure of the biggest deal in town is a stark reminder of how few other pay days are in prospect.

There are only a handful of other big deals in train, and many of those involve the British Government, not known as a generous payer.

Still, there is one consolation. With speculation mounting that a weakened BHP may be under pressure to break itself up, those advisers will be dusting down their pitch documents as we speak.

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