By Mark Kleinman, City Editor
The chairman of Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) will on Friday deliver an explicit message that the state-backed lender will be ready to begin being privatised within 12 months.
I have learnt that Sir Philip Hampton will say that George Osborne, the Chancellor, will be able to press the button on a multi-billion pound share sale by the middle of next year.
He will also say for the first time that the bank is to begin preparing a prospectus alongside Treasury officials that will be delivered to investors likely to be interested in buying part of the Government's 82% stake in the bank.
Sir Philip's comments that RBS' rehabilitation is in the final stages of completion will be made in a message that will be published on Friday morning, according to an adviser to the bank.
His comments will expand on earlier remarks made by him and Stephen Hester, RBS's chief executive, in which they had outlined the broad ambition of a state sell-off ahead of the next general election.
Previously, the two men had described the timing of a sell-off as being entirely a matter for the Government.
Sir Philip's remarks will come as RBS announces a pre-tax profit for the first quarter of 2013, a rare foray into black ink for the troubled lender's balance sheet since its rescue more than four years ago.
The numbers, which I understand will show an underlying profit of around £200m and a larger profit at the pre-tax level, will, like other UK banks, include no new provision for the mis-selling of payment protection insurance.
They will provide evidence that, like Lloyds Banking Group earlier this week, there is an emerging path towards a sale of the shares that the previous Labour government acquired during the bank rescues of 2008.
Last week's resignation of Jim O'Neil, who runs the agency responsible for managing the taxpayer's stakes in Lloyds and RBS, left many City analysts to conclude that a privatisation of the stakes was a distant prospect.
Stringent regulatory reforms, and tough measures likely to be recommended by the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards in the next two months, have acted to depress the two banks' share prices well below the average price at which the Government bought them.
However, this week there have been signals from Whitehall that the Conservative-led coalition could be prepared to sanction share sales at the current prices, rather than waiting for the prospect of them recovering to their 2008 levels.
One of the principal obstacles to a sale of the Government's RBS stake could be a demand made by the outgoing Governor of the Bank of England, Sir Mervyn King, that the lender should be broken up into two separate entities.
Sir Philip is also keen to begin the process of RBS's shares returning to private sector hands because he believes it will give him the best chance of retaining Mr Hester.
He fears that a prolonged period of uncertainty about RBS's structure and ownership will prompt Mr Hester to resign.
RBS declined to comment.
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