Whether or not a company is bankrupt is not and should not be decided by the shareholders. If it was decided by them they would obviously never declare it bankr

Whether or not a company is bankrupt is not and should not be decided by the shareholders. If it was decided by them they would obviously never declare it bankrupt. The mechanism for "getting paid with a snickers bar" is just a streamlined but still fair version of a restructuring bankruptcy. In a bankruptcy all of the equity gets wiped out and the shareholders no longer have a say in the matters. Morally because they failed to run the company, but also because they positioned themselves to take the greatest gains, and thus should be exposed to absorb the greatest losses. It's not so much specific to any country as it is to the very idea of capitalism / being a shareholder. The fact that a banking regulator gets involved and orders this or that does not necessarily change the fundamental way in which things would happen to another non-bank corporation. Equity would get wiped out, sometimes together with the least secured credit - see "fulcrum security".