UK Financial Investments (UKFI), the government agency in charge of managing the interest, said that the public shareholding of HM Treasury in the lender has been reduced to 21%.
During 2007-2009 financial crisis the taxpayers in the UK injected £20bn into the group in order to relieve it, leaving the government with a 41% stake, Reuters reported.
Half of that stake was sold with further plans to sell £9bn worth of the stock by the year 2016.
Britain’s finance ministry said in a notification to the London Stock Exchange that its stake in the bank at present stands at 20.95%.
In December, UKFI hired Morgan Stanley to sell shares of Lloyds through a ‘pre-arranged trading plan’.
In March, UK’s Chancellor George Osborne announced that the government sold another £500m of Lloyds Banking Group shares, taking the total amount of money raised through the trading plan launched in December 2014 to over £1bn.
These sales as well as the dividend announced by Lloyds totaled amount recovered for the taxpayer from the lender to about £8.5bn.
Recently, the UK government announced plans to sell up to $6bn of its shares in Lloyds to small retail investors if George Osborne’s Conservative Party wins the 7 May general election.
According to Osborne, the sale proposal will help the government recover from the financial crisis and pay down the national debt, the news agency said.
Image: Lloyds Banking Group head office in the UK. Photo: courtesy of Lloyds Bank plc
