@sluj
Am I right in thinking that Mr R told his wife he was actually going to help them but hadn't yet told them that? I have to say the mechanics of how he could do that using the shares puzzled me a bit?
Russell would have to stop buying shares in his company that come on the market, thus allowing the price to stabilise or even decrease. That means the aldermen aren't on the hook for quite so much money out of their own pocket.
Basically, the aldermen's plan was to short Russell's company's shares on margin and make a tidy profit.
Let me explain ... these things have parts.
A) Their plan was to borrow shares in Russell's company, announce the station was going ahead, watch the share price increase and sell the borrowed shares at the increased price of x.
B) Then they would announce the station wasn't going ahead, and the share price would collapse to x-%.
C) They would then buy those x-% shares and return them to the lender of the shares. In the process, they would pocket the difference between x-% and x.
There then appears to have been an additional plan to then personally purchase (i.e. not borrow) huge numbers of shares at x-%, rescind the rescindment of the station bill, and ride the recovery wave up to infinity and beyond (price x++%) thus making a fortune in the process.
However, Russell skewered them by refusing to allow the share price to collapse by buying all the x-% shares that came on the market. His purchases kept demand at a level, so the price never came down around the B part of the plan. Indeed, it appears to have gone up to x+%
The aldermen are now facing ruin because they will have to return the shares they borrowed and sold at x price by purchasing Russell's inflated shares at x+%. That +% will have to come out of their own pockets and, if they cannot afford it, they will go bankrupt.
Essentially, the aldermen, or the ones that will be left, are now in a position where they can do nothing but rescind the rescindment of the station bill in order to stop Russell inflating the price of the shares by buying all of them that come onto the market, and hopefully they will only be on the hook for x%, rather than x+%.
Or Russell could decide out of the goodness of his heart to stop buying the shares, so the price can stablise.
Did that help? Or did I just make it more confusing? 