RBS gears up for Citizens float with £5.5m payout for bosses

Shares rose 2.5pc on Friday, with the taxpayer-owned bank committing to staying in Scotland. The bank said contingency plans to move south were “no longer required”.

Earlier this month, RBS announced it would sell as much as 161m shares in Citizens — a 29pc stake — at a price of between $23 and $25 a share.

The bank — 80pc owned by the taxpayer — is selling at least 140m shares with the option to get away another 21m should demand prove high enough.

It plans to sell the rest of Citizens by the end of 2016, by which time the Government is expected to have begun selling off its own stake in RBS.

A majority of leading institutional investors — 69pc — believe the Treasury will begin selling off shares in the bank next year, according to a survey from Capital Spreads, the spread-betting firm.

Citizens is the 13th-biggest retail bank in the United States, with around 5m customers and 1,230 branches, and made a profit of $479m in the first half of 2014. However, it failed the Federal Reserve’s stress tests earlier this year due to problems with its capital planning, restricting dividend payments to 10 cents a share until it can reapply in January.

RBS has just completed a two-week investor roadshow ahead of the float, expected on Tuesday. The eventual sale of the whole bank is expected to improve RBS’s capital ratio by as much as 3pc.

Þ Lloyds Banking Group could also be making further disposals after the lock-up period following the bank’s flotation of TSB expired.

Lloyds floated TSB in June, selling 38.5pc of the group at 260p per share. As part of the conditions of the float, Lloyds was banned from selling more shares for 90 days, but is now free to do so, although any imminent sale would have to be before a close period at the start of October. TSB shares closed at 292p on Friday.

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