The structured products market produced a tiny glimmer of good news today for troubled UK bank Northern Rock, when one of its structured products matured with an estimated return of around 144% on half the investment.

Northern Rock’s Fifty:Fifty Issue 11 is a five-year growth bond that struck in September 2002, offering 70% of the rise in the underlying FTSE100 with final one-year monthly averaging on half the investment and 7.5% for one year on the remainder.

Northern Rock left the structured products market in November 2005, saying its ambitions to grow at a rate of around 20% per year created funding requirements that could not be met by structured products investors. “We’re a volume player,” said a spokesman at the time. In a statement that now seems prophetic, he said, “Structured products might be enough for other lenders, but they don’t meet our funding requirements,” adding, “They provide cheaper funding, but otherwise use up a lot of resources for very little return.”

For readers that have missed the furore, former building society Northern Rock, which is based in north-east England, has experienced a run on the bank over the past few days, following a request to the Bank of England for emergency short-term funding and subsequent loss of confidence among its depositors. The bank had struggled to raise money to finance its lending since money markets seized up over the summer.

Northern Rock is built around its mortgage business. It raises most of the money for mortgages by borrowing in the wholesale markets. “For us the world changed on August 9, when banks suddenly stopped lending to each other,” chief executive Adam Applegarth was quoting as saying in the UK financial dailies.

Until earlier this year, Northern Rock had been growing its lending aggressively, and in the first six months of 2007 it overtook market-leader HBOS to attain first place and a 19% share of net lending. It now expects this year’s profits to plummet from earlier forecasts of £647m to between £500m and £540m and is highly unlikely to remain an independent entity.

Northern Rock launched a series of nine guaranteed bonds between May and November 2005 after an 18-month absence from the market. The products usually had market-leading rates, the last in the series paying 130% of the FTSE over five years.

This product is available in Maturing Products (UK).