The Royal Bank of Scotland is to break up its Asian business, including that in India, after running into trouble with an attempted auction of the 600-million-pound (Rs 4,760-crore/$990-million) operation, a newspaper reported on Sunday.
The Sunday Times said the troubled bank, one of the largest in Britain in terms of market capitalisation, had run into a string of regulatory hurdles that had derailed efforts to package together its operations in China, India and Southeast Asia into one saleable business.
It said three shortlisted bidders - Australia and New Zealand Banking Group, HSBC and Standard Chartered - are now said to be more interested in cherry-picking individual operations rather than buying the business as a whole.
The sale, one of the first in RBS's plans to dispose of assets, was initially expected to have raised nearly two billion pounds ($3.3 billion or Rs 15,900 crore), but the sum has now been dropped, the paper said.