Clients of Baillie Gifford, the Edinburgh-based fund manager, have been worst hit by the Northern Rock troubles, seeing almost £250 million wiped from their investments.

Baillie Gifford is the biggest shareholder in Northern Rock, with 6 per cent of the company, according to the most recent filings. Since the £12.50 peak in February, its stake has collapsed to 282¾p, reducing the stake from £315 million to £71 million.

Baillie Gifford, which declined to comment yesterday, manages £53 billion on behalf of institutional and retail clients, including the Cheshire County Council and John Lewis pension funds.

Other Rock shareholders nursing big losses include Scottish Widows, which owns a 4.7 per cent stake, Legal & General (almost 4 per cent) and F&C (2.6 per cent). Investors, including 170,000 small shareholders who were given shares in the demutu-alisation of the old building society, have seen £4.1 billion wiped from their holdings since February.

Some investors are beginning to question the handling of the crisis by the Rock board, fearing that a sale of the business now would raise far less, if anything, than had a deal been done before the wave of withdrawals.

Yesterday, investors began to turn their ire on the Tyneside-based bank, led by Adam Applegarth, chief executive, accusing it of being complicit in its own demise.

Euan Stirling, a fund manager at Standard Life Investments, told the BBC’s Today programme that it was “no accident that Northern Rock are in the position they are in and other banks aren’t”.

He said: “The company has been aggressively lending for the last few years, lending more than double its natural market share, while at the same time it’s been wholly reliant on the wholesale funding markets.

“This has got it into problems, particularly as its treasury management has been very weak - that treasury management resulted in it having to issue a profits warning this year, having just a few months prior to that raised its profits growth guidance to analysts in the City.”

Mr Stirling said that management failures, rather than the credit squeeze, were responsible for Northern Rock’s predicament.

As he predicted that the bank’s “days as an independent entity are probably up”, Mr Stirling said that another day or two of weakness in the share price was likely to prompt a bidder to emerge.

Standard Life stood by Mr Stirling’s comments but declined to elaborate further.

One top ten shareholder declined to lay the blame solely at Northern Rock’s door: “It is a flawed business model, but it is one that we believed in as well as the management.”

Northern Rock was praised by some analysts and investors this year when it announced its ambitious plans to be a top three player in the mortgage markets. Mr Applegarth was seen by many investors as the executive capable of transforming the bank into a nationwide market leader.

However, another substantial shareholder argued that Northern Rock had mishandled its sale process: “They should have been able to get a deal done before going to the Bank of England. I would say that their sale strategy wasn’t desperately smart.”

It emerged over the weekend that Lloyds TSB and Northern Rock had been in serious talks over an emergency takeover by the No 5 high street retail bank, although a deal was rumoured to have been blocked by regulators.

The revelation that Northern Rock had approached the Bank of England for emergency funding was seen as irreversibly harming the bank’s brand and effectively hoisting a “For Sale” sign and ensuring that it became a distressed asset.

This fund manager said that Northern Rock had hoped to create “tension” in the bid process by keeping open the option of going to the central bank rather than just accepting a reasonable offer. As a result, he said, bidders walked away.

Another shareholder lower down the Northern Rock register complained that regulators such as the Financial Services Authority should have intervened earlier. “They get monthly returns from these banks. Why did they not spot anything was wrong?” the shareholder asked.

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