The chief executive of Lloyds Banking Group has opened the door to a return to the dividend list as he prepares to reveal the bank's net lending to UK businesses has increased for the first time since the global credit crisis.
Antonio Horta-Osorio raised the prospect of a dividend - which would be the first since the merger of Lloyds and HBOS at the height of the financial crisis in late 2008 - as he set out the bank's strong position on lending. In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph ahead of the bank's first-quarter results on Tuesday, Horta-Osorio gave the strongest suggestion to date that the bank could be about to begin to return capital to investors. "As we finish our legacy issues, the profitability of the bank is going to increase a lot in the future, and, given we don't have a usage for those fu...
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