Aldermore is the latest suitor to join the battle for The Co-operative Bank.

The mid-sized consumer and business lender, which is owned by South Africa’s FirstRand Group, is in talks with investment bankers on the size and structure of a potential takeover deal, according to Sky News.

Rival Shawbrook Group is understood to have approached The Co-Op Bank a month ago about a merger that valued it at around £800m.

Last week The Co-op Bank’s owners set an early October deadline for non-binding bids – kicking off a long-awaited sale process for the High Street bank. Sources suggested Aldermore plans to table a bid ahead of this deadline.

The Co-Op Bank more than quadrupled its profit in 2022 to £132.6m

NatWest and the Irish government have jointly sold a 10 per cent stake in Permanent TSB amidst heightened interest in the firm’s shares.

The British banking giant and the Republic of Ireland’s Department of Finance have earned €55.2million (£47.5million) each from selling almost 55 million shares betwen them in the financial services provider.

Both parties initially declared on Thursday that they intended to each offload a 3 per cent holding but ended up auctioning more due to larger-than-expected demand.

Shares in PTSB have soared in the past year after successive interest rate hikes by the European Central Bank and the acquisition of some of Ulster Bank’s loans book significantly boosted the group’s income.

These factors helped the company rebound to a €267million profit for 2022 from a €22million loss the previous year.

Following the transaction, the Irish state will continue to own 57.4 per cent of PTSB, while NatWest’s stake will decline to 12.6 per cent.

Until this week, the Irish government had not sold any PTSB shares since 2015, when its shareholding was reduced from 99 per cent to 75 per cent.

Michael McGrath, Ireland’s minister for finance, said the transaction ‘will help improve liquidity and interest in the bank as we continue preparations for a wider disposal programme in the coming years.’

He added: ‘As I have previously stated, the government believes that banking is an activity that should be provided primarily by the private sector and that taxpayer funds which were used to recapitalise the banks should be recovered and used for more productive purposes.’

Formerly the banking division of Irish Life & Permanent, PTSB experienced hard times during the Irish banking crisis due to the high volume of loss-making mortgages on its books.

It was effectively nationalised in 2011 under a €4billion recapitalisation scheme, the same year the business recorded a €424milllion loss.

Soon after Jeremy Masding was made chief executive the next year, the European Commission approved the firm’s restructuring plan, which included job cuts and a significant deleveraging scheme. 

The lender eventually returned to profitability in 2015 and finished the deleveraging plan following the sale of its remaining UK loan book to investment group Cerberus Capital Management.

NatWest first took a stake in PTSB two years ago when the latter bought around €7.6billion of loans and assets and 88 bank branches belonging to Dublin-based subsidiary Ulster Bank.

Friday’s share sale forms part of NatWest’s strategy to exit the Irish market, where it has struggled with profitability and cost-cutting measures, in order to focus on the UK business and free up excess capital.

Ulster Bank announced more than 800 redundancies last week, having shut down its entire branch network across the Republic of Ireland in April. 

A bank owned by a friend of Prince Andrew has been fined £10m for allegedly plotting to wage economic war on Qatar.

Banque Havilland, a private bank based in Luxembourg, was hit with the sanction by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) after the watchdog ruled it attempted to use manipulative trading strategies to devalue the Qatari riyal currency.

The bank is controlled by the Rowland family, including Conservative Party donor David ‘Spotty’ Rowland, famous for reportedly bank-rolling Prince Andrew. 

Rowland’s son Edmund, the bank’s former UK boss, was hit with a financial services ban and fined £352,000. The FCA fined and struck off ex-branch manager David Weller and employee Vladimir Bolelyy.

The bank and Rowland have appealed. Edmund Rowland said: ‘I refute the FCA allegations in full. I am challenging them in the independent tribunal.’

The FCA said that in 2017, the bank drew up trading strategies aimed at devaluing Qatar’s currency relative to rivals, aimed at creating a false or misleading impression about the Qatari bond market, intending to present the document to Qatar’s rivals who may want to put economic pressure on it.

It did not believe the strategy was ever implemented, but said that such a strategy could have been a criminal offence had it taken place in the UK.

Therese Chambers, head of enforcement at the FCA, said the bank’s ‘conduct actively encouraged the commission of financial crime, providing ideas for manipulative trading to someone it saw as having the political motivation to be potentially interested in such ideas. The misconduct of Edmund Rowland was deliberate.’

She added: ‘Weller claimed to have believed that the other two were joking around but as a senior manager he behaved recklessly.’

David Rowland is a Guernsey resident who has been dubbed the ‘tax haven tycoon’ – and has acted as Prince Andrew’s financial adviser, attending Princess Eugenie’s wedding in 2018.

In 2017 he reportedly paid off a £1.5m loan for Andrew.

He owns a palatial estate, Havilland Hall, where in 2005 the prince unveiled a bronze statue of Rowland smoking a cigar.