U. K. Government Sells Final Stake in Lloyds Banking Group -<br />By CHAD BRAYMAY 17, 2017<br />LONDON — Nearly nine years after a government bailout during the financial crisis, the Lloyds Banking Group is fully private again.<br />Lloyds — one of Britain’s four largest lenders — said on Wednesday<br />that it had returned to private ownership after the British government sold its final stake.<br />The bank was forced to take its bailout from the government in 2008 after a poorly timed acquisition of<br />the mortgage lender HBOS, the operator of Halifax and Bank of Scotland, as the financial crisis hit.<br />The bank has set aside more than £17 billion to compensate people who were improperly sold the insurance,<br />and it was fined £117 million in June 2015 for its handling of customer complaints related to the product.<br />Mr. Horta-Osório has called payment protection insurance the lender’s biggest “legacy issue.”<br />But a deadline of August 2019 for making new complaints may allow Lloyds<br />and the rest of the British banking industry to finally move past that scandal.
