Taxpayer owned banks suffer massive loss
August 5th, 2009 | by abigail |This is the week when many uk banks are revealing their first half figures, whether they’ve made a profit or a loss. On Monday this site published details of Barclays and HSBC
Yesterday Northern Rock announced their first half losses and today its been the turn of Lloyds banking group. The Government took a charge of 43% £13.4bn in Lloyds group, mainly for bad loans, 80% of which came from the struggling HBOS which Lloyds took over.
Stephen Timms, chief secretary to the Treasury Said of with Lloyds the losses where in line with what had been expected. He was also very happy with their lending to business saying
“Lloyds is starting to do the things we need banks to be doing: £18bn of mortgage lending in the first six months of this year and 60,000 new start-up business accounts.”
Northern Rock the bank nationalised becuase of its financial difficulties posted losses of over £700 Million yesterday, more than 12,000 of its ‘125pc mortgage’ borrowers where in arrears.
The bank continued to issue the controversial home loans for several months after getting into financial trouble in September 2007.
The bank was given a £26 billion bail out by the Government and still owes the UK Taxpayer £10.9 billion.
No one from the gvernment or the treasury wanted to comment on Northern Rock.