Y otro artículo en inglés (gracias a Antonio Rebull por pasármelo), más explícito en lo que a nosotros nos interesa (el cupón de las preferentes):
RBS Says It Will Pay Back Last of Government Emergency Aid
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2012/05/04/bloomberg_articlesM3GBSI1A1I4H01-M3HMA.DTL
By Gavin Finch
May 4 (Bloomberg) -- Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc, Britain's biggest publicly-owned lender, said it will pay back the last of its emergency aid from the U.K. government and will resume paying dividends on preference shares.
Operating profit rose 4 percent in the first quarter to 1.18 billion pounds ($1.91 billion) from 1.13 billion pounds a year earlier, the Edinburgh-based bank said in a statement today. Analysts predicted a profit of 917 million pounds, according to the median estimate of six surveyed by Bloomberg.
RBS will by the end of next month have repaid 164 billion pounds of emergency aid it received from the U.K. and U.S. governments as it received the biggest bank bailout in history in 2008. It still leaves the British taxpayer with an 82 percent stake in the bank, which it bought for 45.5 billion pounds. The stock is trading for half the price the government paid.
"RBS has made enormous progress and they are delivering on what they said they would," said Ian Gordon, an analyst at Investec Securities Ltd. in London. "The balance sheet metrics are very impressive."
The shares rose 1.1 percent to 24.81 pence by 8:02 a.m. in London, giving the bank a market value of 27.9 billion pounds. After sinking 48 percent last year, the stock has rebounded 23 percent this year. The government bought shares at an average price of 50.2 pence a share.
Resume Dividends
Chief Executive Officer Stephen Hester said today the government has no desire to sell shares at today's price.
"While I think everyone is focused on that being the desired end game, I'm not aware of anything imminent on that front," Hester, 51, told reporters on a conference call today.
RBS said it will resume discretionary dividend payments to preference share holders after a European Union ban expired at the end of last month. The plan will cost 350 million pounds.
Ordinary shareholders may have to wait at least year because regulators in the U.K. and the U.S. are pushing banks to bolster capital as the latest round of rules set by the Basel Committee on Bank Supervision are implemented, Hester said.
"We are very clear one of the manifestations of the end state of RBS is we should be a strong dividend payer," he said. "The issue is how we get there."
RBS said it will repay the last of the 75 billion pound debt provided by the U.K. government's Credit Guarantee Scheme funding.
Compensation
RBS followed Lloyds Banking Group Plc and Barclays Plc in increasing the amount it is putting aside to compensate customers who were improperly sold payment protection insurance. The bank earmarked an additional 125 million pounds after taking an 850 million-pound charge last year. That was lower than the increase of between 200 million pounds and 300 million pounds, as estimated by three analysts in a Bloomberg News survey.
Lloyds this week took an additional 375 million-pound PPI charge after a 3.2 billion-pound hit last year while Barclays last week set aside an additional 300 million pounds for compensation after a 1 billion-pound charge last year.
The insurance of payments on credit cards and mortgages in case of illness or unemployment, was improperly sold by the biggest U.K. banks. Clients who bought the policies rarely compared prices or terms and sometimes were not covered.
The lender's loss-making Ulster Bank unit continues to face "exceedingly difficult market conditions" RBS said in the statement.
'Time Bomb'
The loss decreased to 310 billion pounds in the first quarter from 365 million pounds in the year-earlier period on impaired mortgages. RBS has injected as much as 10 billion pounds into its Irish unit since 2008, the bank said in February.
Hester, who has said his job is equivalent to defusing the "biggest time bomb in history," has shrunk assets by more than 700 billion pounds and cut more than 35,000 jobs since he took over from Fred Goodwin in 2008.
Operating profit at the bank's consumer unit fell 7.9 percent to 477 million pounds in the period, while operating profit at the corporate unit slid 20 percent, RBS said.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2012/05/04/bloomberg_articlesM3GBSI1A1I4H01-M3HMA.DTL#ixzz1tyZ41uaO
La realidad está hecha de cisnes negros, no de elefantes rosas; sobreoptimizar te fragiliza y lleva al desastre
