RBS cans the Willlians and Glynn spin off

[Suff]

And sinks £1bn into the business. The statement is that the cut in interest rates makes it extremely difficult to afford the spin off and they will find other ways to keep the commission happy.

I've been waiting for something like this for at least 6 weeks. There has been a decision at work which has been on hold so long that it could only be explained by this decision.

[Workingman]

£2bn in losses in six months.

The £1bn 'investment' is in the form or restructuring costs.

It will now sell its 300-branch Williams & Glyn bank, rather than listing it, with Santander the front runner to buy - no doubt at a fraction of what it is really worth.

RBS is a basket case which is looking to post losses for nine years in a row. Never mind, us taxpayers will pick up the bill seeing as we 'own' nearly 75% of it.

[Suff]

RBS paid out £3.5bn in PPE claims, 33% of which went to the companies making the claims for people, staffed by the same banking people who sold the PPE in the first place.

The last loss would have been a profit without PPE and the US government fines.

Should the government close PPE and no further files are levied on RBS, then it will be back in profit.

It's always useful to put it all in context. Not many institutions can withstand this level of punitive action, year after year, after having suffered such a meltdown in the first place.

I don't so much blame RBS (they may be useless but they can usually make more than they spend), as the governments who are interfering in it. One of the largest revenue makers for RBS was DirectLine. Sold off to pay money back to the government. With a corresponding loss in net positive revenue. W&G will be another one where they have gathered another bunch of family silver into one place and are auctioning it off to the lowest bidder to meet a political objective.

Which will leave RBS with even lower net revenue and still high costs.

The end result is obvious. RBS won't make a profit until it is finally sold off by the government, broken up and restructured with thousands of job losses and investors (mainly pension funds), impacted.

All for political gain. RBS had the ability, as it was structured, to pull itself out of the mire. So long as they put in management to do that. The government could even have got a profit out of it's rescue.

What they are doing now to "punish" the bank is nothing more than losing value and damaging jobs and the economy. That might play well in Brussels but should be totally impossible in the UK. The fact that people even think it's a good idea tells me just how much the press are shovelling out lies to the people and politicians alike.


RBS should have been supported and restructured. Not raided for whatever bits could be stripped off to make a quick buck whilst holding all the debt in one place.

I totally refuse to believe that the Commission did not aim to get a greater foothold in the UK market by trashing RBS. Now that is out of the window and I'm glad.

For those who don't know, RBS employs 140,000 people, the majority of whom are in the UK. Allowing the UK to fail is way worse than allowing the British steel factories to fail but it won't make one page inch until it does.

[Workingman]

Context eh?

Wasn't it because Fred 'the shred' Goodwin and his pals made such a hash of things that we poor sods had to take the bloody thing over? How much did that impact on workers and pension funds.

How much money did the country put into RBS because it was "too big to fail"?

My heart bleeds for RBS. If this hadn't happened and if that had happened and if it hadn't tried to make quick quids selling PPI it would be back in profit: if; if; if.

The way the thing has been run is a shambles and because of that its staff might now need PPE.

[Suff]

No the more important thing is that the politicians have made a long running catastrophe out of a disaster in order to score points.

That won't go away with a W&G sale. It will just get worse.

What's even worse is that those same politicians are pouring away taxpayers money faster than they poured it into RBS.

With a bit of common sense and good management, RBS could have turned the UK a profit. Instead they chose to make political standpoints on it. So we all lose.