Santander float is still years away

THE boss of Santander says it will be years before the lender presses ahead with long-mooted plans to float on the UK stock market.

Finance chief Stephen Jones quit the bank this week over the delays.

It is five years since Spanish parent Banco Santander first signalled its intention to list the UK arm.

Asked when it would take place, Santander UK’s chief executive Nathan Bostock ( pictured) said: ‘I would say in the medium term but we’re not looking at the next couple of years.’ The comments came as Banco Santander’s first-half results showed the UK has overtaken Brazil as its most profitable market.

Profits here jumped to £928m in the first half of the year, up 70pc on the same period last year.

This amounted to just over a fifth of the Spanish-owned group’s profits for the period and eclipsed the £700m posted by its Brazilian operation.

The UK division was buoyed by a surge in current account customers, with more than 500,000 using the seven-day switching service to move to Santander since it was introduced in September 2013.

Another 600,000 customers took out its popular fee-paying 123 account which pays cashback on purchases and costs £2 a month.

But mortgage lending fell by almost £1bn to £11.9bn. Banco Santander, the Spanish parent group, saw profits rise 24pc to £2.4bn. ÷ LLOyDS has sold a loss-making portfolio of Irish commercial property loans for £827m, to focus on the UK and shed risky assets. The bank sold the portfolio, which has a face value of £2.6bn but made a loss of £130m last year, to a consortium including Goldman Sachs and Bank of Ireland. The loans are a hangover from the reckless lending of HBOS in Ireland before it was rescued by Lloyds in 2008.

Of the £2.6bn loans sold, £2.3bn is impaired, meaning Lloyds believes it is unlikely they will be repaid.