Smart move by Lloyds Banking Group getting the bad news out of the way with the good news.
Today’s headline is the £1.8 billion extra costs of PPI mis-selling. That takes Lloyds’ total bill to almost £10 billion — far more than chief executive Antonio Horta-Osorio could have expected when he first broke out of the banking corral to settle PPI claims in 2011.
Lloyds has calculated on a much more conservative basis than previously that a further 550,000 PPI complaints will come in. It hopes, fervently, that the £2.8 billion left in the kitty after paying out and administering 2.5 million complaints so far will be enough.
The political masters want to get that taxpayer share sale away. A kitchen sink job is permissible.
The shares, predictably, fell on today’s news. That should mean they won’t when full results are published next week. Indeed they could be considerably higher when the share sale is launched in March. This is a share offer that must be priced to go.
