RBS, biggest British stated-owned bank losses of £3.5bn !

Bailed out: Royal Bank of Scotland is set to announce losses of £3.5bn on Friday. It is worth £26bn - and the Government paid £45.5bn

(Bloomberg) -- Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc, Britain's biggest government-owned lender, posted a wider full- year loss than analysts estimated after writing down Greek debt and compensating customers who were improperly sold insurance.

The net loss for 2011 was 2 billion pounds ($3.1 billion) compared with 1.1 billion pounds a year earlier, the U.K.'s second-largest bank by assets said in a statement today. That was worse than the 1.1 billion-pound median estimate of 11 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.

The government was forced to rescue RBS at the height of the financial crisis, injecting 45.5 billion pounds of taxpayer money into the lender, making it the costliest bailout of any bank. Chief Executive Officer Stephen Hester, 51, has shrunk the bank's assets by more than 600 billion pounds to 1.66 billion pounds and cut more than 35,000 jobs since he took over from Fred Goodwin in 2007. Hester said earlier this month that restructuring RBS was equivalent to defusing "the biggest time bomb in history."

The company took a sovereign-debt impairment of 1.1 billion pounds, writing off Greek government debt as part of a European Union agreement.

RBS's loss would have been narrower if it hadn't had to set aside 950 million pounds to compensate U.K. customers who were improperly sold personal-loan insurance.

RBS's results were also affected by rising borrowing costs as the bank weans itself off low-interest government loans and takes on costlier funding in wholesale markets. The bank opted in December to go the European Central Bank for an emergency 5 billion euro loan as its own costs of borrowing reached an unsustainable level, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The government was forced to rescue RBS at the height of the financial crisis, injecting 45.5 billion pounds of taxpayer money into the lender, making it the costliest bailout of any bank in the world.

--Editors: Keith Campbell, Francis Harris.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2105218/RBS-banks-posts-losses-2bn-casino-bankers-enjoy-390m-bonus-pot.html#ixzz1nGtFy7DQ

Civil servants shortlived bonus joy for double payout to 3,054!

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The bank forgot to withdraw the previous instruction, which led to the double payout - Datuk Farizan Darus

By Fong Kee Soon
The Star/Asia News Network

GEORGE TOWN: About half of the civil servants employed by the state have been mistakenly paid their half-month year-end bonus twice, through a banking error.

State secretary Datuk Farizan Darus said the double bonus' was erroneously paid out to 3,054 civil servants.

He said the bank had intended to pay the salary for December on Monday and the bonus on Tuesday the following day.

“However, the State Government felt it was better to pay everything on Monday and instructed the bank to do so.

“The bank forgot to withdraw the previous payment instructions, which led to the double payout of the bonus,” he told a press conference on Wednesday.



Farizan said the problem was realised on Tuesday itself when word got out to civil servants from several state agencies who did not receive the double bonus'.

“They asked to be paid twice as well, as they did not know it was a mistake by the bank,” he said.

Farizan added that the bank was working on debiting the extra bonus from the civil servants' bank accounts.

He said that at the time of the press conference, 233 accounts involving a sum of RM164,000 had yet to be sorted out and the bank was expected to resolve the whole matter soon.

Farizan said the State Government was advising those who withdrew the extra bonus to co-operate with the bank.

Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng had announced last month that the State Government would be paying out a half-month bonus with minimum payment of RM800 for state civil servants this year.

Civil servants were also paid a bonus of a half-month salary with minimum payment of RM600 in conjunction with the Hari Raya celebration in August this year.