It’s fantastic news that we’ve sold more shares in Lloyds Bank, taking the total recovered for the taxpayer to £15.5 billion.
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The sale is set to be the biggest privatization in Britain since the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher’s government sold £3.9B worth of shares in British Telecom and £5.6B worth of British Gas shares.
The Treasury sources said on Tuesday that more people had expressed an interest in buying into Lloyds in just one day than in the entire two-week registration for shares in postal delivery Royal Mail, which was privatised two years ago.
Yesterday, leading wealth manager Hargreaves Lansdown said it alone had registered 120,000 potential investors. Stock market announcements show that the government’s stake in Lloyds has fallen by 1.01% since September 25th, and now sits at 10.97%.
‘This reflects the hard work undertaken over the last four years to transform the Group into a simple, low-risk and customer-focused bank that is committed to helping Britain prosper’. JPMorgan Chase & Co. reaffirmed a buy rating on shares of Lloyds Banking Group PLC in a research report on Monday.
Pension funds and other institutions are more than happy to pay full price, as today’s news that they’ve snapped up a further half a billion pounds’ worth at the going rate proves.
The government has already cut its shareholding to less than 12 percent from 43 percent by selling shares to institutional investors such as pension funds and insurers.
The newly-announced conversion means that all of the Government’s holding will be through ordinary shares.
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The first batch of the state’s RBS shares was returned to private hands in August when the Treasury sold a 5.4pc holding to take its economic ownership down from 78.3pc to 72.9pc. The shares have received an average rating of 1 from 2 brokerage firms.
