THE government’s sale of a 7.7 per cent stake in the Royal Bank of Scotland was condemned yesterday by the bank staff’s union Unite.

UK Government Investments confirmed the sell-off on Monday, reducing the public holding in the bank to 62.4 per cent.

Unite national officer Rob MacGregor said that the sale — at a loss of £2 billion in the value of shares bought by the British taxpayer in the bank’s 2008 bailout — is “a betrayal of public finances.”

He said: “The catalogue of failures across the bank, ranging from thousands of staff cuts, closing hundreds of branches and also the sale of financial products which resulted in the $4.9 billion (£3.6bn) US fine demonstrates the systematic failures by the management to effectively run this organisation.

“Staff across the business are continuing to pay for the mistakes at the top while the government merely looks the other way.”

Chancellor Philip Hammond claimed that the sale was a “significant step in returning RBS to full private ownership and putting the financial crisis behind us.”