COMPANIES Alistair Darling was on Monday night battling to avoid fully nationalising Royal Bank of Scotland after the state-controlled lender suffered a 67 per cent plunge in its share price when it revealed the biggest loss in Britain’s corporate history.
In spite of lifting its shareholding in RBS to 70 per cent on Monday, the government is desperate to avoid nationalising another bank and saddling the Treasury with RBS’s £2,000bn balance sheet and the political responsibility for the bank’s lending policy.
