Osbourne mulling sale of Ulster Bank assets

The British Chancellor has raised the possibility of selling Ulster Bank's assets.

George Osbourne said he has ordered an urgent review, to report in the autumn, into the possibility of breaking up RBS into a “good bank” and a “bad bank”, to separate out toxic assets and risky loans from parts of the business which support the economy.

The review will particularly focus on assets in Ulster Bank and UK commercial real estate, and will not involve any further injection of taxpayer money into RBS.

But the Chancellor offered no timetable or price for share sales and said the sale of the British government’s stake remains “some way off”.