We're all bankers now: Taxpayer ends up owning 60% of RBS - but Barclays goes it alon

[Legal Beagles]

Britain's leading banks today came cap-in-hand to ask taxpayers for almost £40billion in the biggest nationalisation in history. Royal Bank of Scotland is to seek £20 billion of funding, HBOS £11.5 billion and Lloyds TSB £5.5 billion.

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[redbus]

Re: We're all bankers now: Taxpayer ends up owning 60% of RBS - but Barclays goes it

This is quite poorly written article. The government will own between 14% and 57% of RBS. The new shares sold makes the government the underwriter. They will take a minimum £5 billion investments in RBS, which equates to just over 14% of the shares. However, should investors fail to take any shares whatsoever, so that means not 1 single share, then the government would be the major shareholder at 57% of all shares owned by them. In all likelyhood it is unlikely to be the case.
RBS Executives have been told that they are not allowed CASH bonuses and any bonuses that would be paid will be in RBS Shares. This is a part nationalisation and not FULL nationalisation where the shareholder would lose all their investment. Will have a look at the HBoS/LloydsTSB deal if it has been agreed and post back. I suspect the upper figures are based on no interest in the shares.

[redbus]

Re: We're all bankers now: Taxpayer ends up owning 60% of RBS - but Barclays goes it

Haven't seen the details of the HBoS issue. Lloyds have certainly changed the merger deal to disadvantage shareholders more and their shares have rocketed downhill. Still awaiting details but I am assuming HBOS rights issue of 40% which means in all likelyhood judging from the RBS deal it will in reality mean up to 10% shareholding in a new HBoS/LloydsTSB merged bank will go to the government and they will be the underwriters in a new rights issue of shares.

Shares in RBS have gone as low as 50p a share which is a massive drop of over 140p in the last 10 days. Their mistake was raising 12 billion pounds earlier in the year yet still having to ask the government for money. Their partners in ABN AMRO(some say they paid over the odds) Fortis were taken over by the Dutch Government. Santander, the other partner seemed to have faired better in all this. I do think many investors are delighted to see the end of Sir Fred(the Shred) Goodwin and news of Sir Tom McKillop retiring will prove good news for all investors. However on the bad news side of things, RBS will not pay a dividends until the government are paid back. I don't think shareholders who want shares to provide an income from the dividend will be that impressed with that so am not sure how their new preference shares will be taken up by non institutional share holders.
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Managing to get some more information. Andy Hornby the HBoS chief will go which in all honesty will please employees of the bank who hated the fact he merged with LloydsTSB and more or less threw their jobs into the pile called "P45". However, government deal has still not changed that pile of "P45" although a lot of people are hoping the deal would collapse rather than them getting the back at an even cheaper price.