Taxpayers suffered a loss of nearly £2bn from the government sale of Royal Bank of Scotland shares nearly two years ago, according to the official public spending watchdog.
Despite the £1.9bn loss – which could build four new large hospitals, or, according to charity Shelter, 33,000 new social homes – the National Audit Office branded the deal “value for money”.
At the height of the financial crisis in 2008, the British government pumped £46bn of public money into RBS.
It is still 72 per cent owned by the taxpayer.
A 5.4 per cent stake was sold to institutional investors in August 2015, raising £2.1bn, which at the time was forecast to represent a £1bn loss for taxpayers.
But today (14 July) the NAO has revealed the loss to be almost twice that.
The public spending watchdog admitted that the details of the government’s RBS stake sale “leaked into the market about an hour before the official announcement”.
“But it had no impact on the sale price,” it concluded.
“The price achieved was at the top end of the bookrunner’s expectations which were communicated before the leak.”
It added that the amount of short selling in RBS stock before the transaction “was not meaningful” in relation to the size of the offering and” not out of the ordinary” relative to RBS’s past levels or those of other UK banks.
laura.miller@ft.com
