Banking giant Barclays is to buy the UK credit card assets of Egg, the online bank owned by Citigroup, for an undisclosed sum. The acquired business has around 1.15m credit card accounts with some £2.3bn of gross receivables. "The acquisition of Egg's UK credit card accounts has been priced at a significant discount to gross receivables. Based on current projections, we expect the transaction to exceed the financial return targets set out at our recent results announcement," said Chris Lucas, group finance director of Barclays. Barclays intends to integrate the accounts into its credit card division, Barclaycard.Citigroup bought Egg from Prudential in January 2007 for £575m. The US bank has been reportedly hatching plans to get shot of Egg for some time as it seeks to raise cash to pay back bail-out funds to the US tax payer. Egg was the UK's first internet bank and was initially a smashing success, gaining more than 2m customers in its launch year. Prudential floated the company on the stock exchange in 2000, but retained 79% of the shares. The shares were floated at 160p but in the aftermath of the bursting of the dot.com bubble the shares drifted lower, and the Pru eventually took the company private again, buying up the shares at 118p each.