RBS offloads Glasgow Hilton Grovesnor for £9.5m

ROYAL Bank of Scotland has sold Glasgow’s Hilton Grosvenor hotel for just under £9.5 million as part of the group’s drive to offload “non-core” assets.

The hotel has been sold to an unnamed private investor, and was one of 11 Hilton properties bought by the bank in 2001 in a £312m sale-and-leaseback deal.

RBS has now divested all but one of these – the five-star Hilton at Anderston in Glasgow, which was priced at £52.9m last year.

Located in the city’s West End, the Hilton Glasgow Grosvenor was originally priced at £11.9m when RBS first put it up for sale a year ago.

The Hilton portfolio forms part of the banking giant’s non-core division of assets, which was set up in 2009 after the financial collapse that led to the group’s bail-out by the UK government.

RBS, which is now 83 per cent owned by the taxpayer, aims to have sold all of these non-core assets by 2013.

Valued at £258bn at its inception, the division’s assets now stand at about £113 billion. Announcing its first-half results last month, RBS said it was on course to further reduce that figure to less than £100bn by the end of 2011.

The disposals are part of the broader strategic recovery plan being driven by RBS chief executive Stephen Hester.

The group posted losses of £1.4bn in the first half of this year, blaming costs from its exposure to Greek bonds and provisions to cover PPI mis- selling claims for the poor performance.