Billions wiped from shares after vote to leave

Yorkshire’s leading companies saw their share prices plunge.

Yorkshire biggest publicly listed company, the housebuilder Persimmon, lost 28 per cent of its value, while credit lender Provident Financial suffered a 16 per cent fall and supermarket chain Morrisons saw a four per cent decline.

Experts said that ​Lloyds Banking Group, which owns the Halifax, and Royal Bank of Scotland could remain part-owned by the taxpayer for years to come after the stock market chaos caused by Brexit.

Analysts said Chancellor George Osborne will be forced to shelve a “Tell Sid”-style offer of shares in Lloyds after banking shares crashed into the red after the vote.

The FTSE 100 Index closed down 3.15 per cent, falling 199.41 points to 6138.69, as it recovered from a seven per cent plunge earlier in the session when David Cameron announced he would quit as Prime Minister by October following the Brexit vote.

Sterling began to creep back from its 10 per cent fall and 31-year low in the early hours of yesterday morning, dropping nine per cent against the dollar to $1.365.

London’s top flight index had lost more than £100bn earlier in the session, while world markets descended into chaos as uncertainty spread across the globe.

The result stunned investors who reacted by rushing to the safety of gold and US government bonds as they became fearful about what will come next for Britain, Europe and the global economy.

It is far from clear what the vote will mean for international trade or for Europe, as the EU has never before lost a member state.

Samuel Tombs, the chief UK economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, said: “This will be an act of economic self-harm with global ramifications.”

Yorkshire PLC reels from the Brexit vote: Page 24.