TO appropriate a hackneyed old phrase, dividends from Royal Bank of Scotland are a bit like buses. Wait for a decade for the first one to turn up and all of sudden the pay-outs come thick and fast.
That the bank has built up a sufficiently strong capital position to return cash to long-suffering shareholders, including tax payers like you and me, is, on the one hand, a welcome sign of its recovery. This, after all, was a bank which needed £45 billion of public money to keep the doors open during the depths of the financial crisis a decade ago. Now it is making billions in profits.
But at what cost have these dividends come? Royal Bank’s journey back to profitability in the last 10 years has been rocky. There has been a regular diet of eye-watering losses and outrage, particularly as the conduct of some senior managers has been exposed to the general public (as highlighted by the treatment of business customers by its Global Restructuring Group).
The journey has also brought a good deal of pain to its own staff. A not inconsiderable element of the bank’s downsizing has involved drastic measures to slash its branch network. Hundreds of branches have gone, including some where it was the last bank in town, leading to thousands of job losses.
So while top brass are now able to shout about the bank’s new-found capital strength, it may well leave a bad taste in the mouths of loyal staff who have lost their livelihoods. Many would be entitled to have expected better from what is still, for now, a publicly-owned organisation.
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