Sale of RBS Unlikely Before 2015 General Election

Treasury chief George Osborne said Friday that the latest strategic plan by state-owned Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC would make it easier to return the bank to private hands, but the sale is unlikely before the next general election due in 2015.Earlier,alligator shear RBS said it would accelerate the sale of its U.S business as part of a suite of measures aimed at appeasing the U.K. government, which has grown increasingly frustrated at the time it is taking to privatize the state-owned lender.The Treasury has concluded it won't break up the 81% government-owned bank. Instead RBS has agreed to earmark 38 billion pounds of assets to be disposed in an internal "bad bank."

"I does make it easier to sell-off the bank and get our money back...That's not going to happen immediately with RBS--it's still very complex. We have got to make it a much simpler bank that is supporting the British economy," Chancellor of the Exchequer Mr. Osborne told BBC radio.He said he thought British taxpayers wanted a bank that was, using cricket terminology, "batting for Britain," he said, noting the bank's goal to sell its U.S. division and become the best domestic small business bank.Mr. Osborne said his "absolute determination," alligator shear as with Lloyds Banking Group PLC--which is 33% owned by the government--was to recover the money that the British taxpayer had pumped into the RBS when it was rescued by the state.

"I think quite frankly [the sale] is unlikely before the general election," he said. "If there was a transformation in RBS and all these problems that it has to confront were dealt with much more quickly,skin analyzer may be we would reconsider. But I say unlikely in the real sense of the word."Mr. Osborne said the government was focused on returning Lloyds to the private sector. It hoped to sell a second tranche of Lloyds shares next year, he said."I want to make sure retail investors, in other words ordinary citizens up and down the country, get a chance to buy Lloyds shares if they want to in the next round of the Lloyds disposal," he said.The treasury chief said he wouldn't be comfortable going to the British people and asking them to invest in RBS until he was clear that it was on top of its problems.

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