A north-west newspaper has launched a bid to help claw back £6.5m a local hospital invested in a now collapsed Icelandic bank.

The world-famous Christie Hospital, in south Manchester, lost the hefty sum when it was advised to invest in Kaupthing Singer and Friedlander which subsequently went into administration in October.

Now the Manchester Evening News is calling on readers to back its ‘Cash Back for Christie’ campaign as hospital managers plan a legal bid to overturn the Financial Services Compensation Scheme’s decision to reject Christie’s attempts reclaim the cash.

The lost money had been earmarked for two new radiotherapy centres in Salford and Oldham but, with bosses funding these two schemes from elsewhere, planned cancer research projects have instead been shelved.

Bosses at the specialist cancer hospital are also trying to recover a further £1m of public funding through the bank’s administrators.

The MEN is printing petition coupons in-paper and has posted a petition on the Number 10 website which has already attracted over 2,400 signatures.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown was in Manchester in Thursday on unrelated business but the MEN’s chief reporter David Ottewell raised the Christie campaign during the interview.

After learning there were protestors outside the MEN’s city centre headquarters, Mr Brown invited them for a 15-minute discussion where he listened to their concerns, providing a splash for Friday’s edition.

Mr Brown told the MEN: “I will be looking at this very carefully. I would like the Icelandic authorities to be able to pay back this money.

“We are in negotiations about that. But where people were under the supervision of other countries’ authorities it is very difficult.”

Assistant editor Robert Ridley told HTFP: “It is simply appalling that such a wonderful place as Christie Hospital should lose £6m of cash, raised by members of the public through all kinds of efforts, purely because of the collapse of this bank.

“Christie would never have invested the money had they not taken very detailed advice that the funds were safe. It was not a high-risk strategy by them.

“They were just trying to get the best return they could on their money to help fund this world-renowned hospital’s tremendous work.

“To have this money taken from them in this way is an absolute scandal, and the MEN intends to keep this campaign in the public eye until they get their money back.”