amateur

There's another £5bn in the RBS plc accounts. It seems they just shovel reserves around the group. Technically you do it by intra-group charges, so to call them capital contribitions is a misnomer.

The capital maintenance guff is tangential.

I guess they would rather stiffen up capital adequacy this way rather than by the issue of further share capital as the transactions can be reversed and excess reserves kicked up to the parent without messing with permissible capital payments etc