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* Q1 pretax profit falls to 74 million pounds
* Bank abandons 2020 guidance
* 406 million pound tax credit lifts results
By Iain Withers and Sinead Cruise
LONDON, April 30 (Reuters) - Lloyds Banking Group
saw its pretax profit all but wiped out in the first quarter,
after becoming the latest lender hobbled by huge provisions
against expected bad loans due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Britain's biggest domestic lender on Thursday posted pre-tax
profits of 74 million pounds, down from 1.6 billion pounds the
previous year, hit by a 1.4 billion pounds ($1.75 billion) loan
impairments charge.
The figure was sharply below the 863 million pounds average
of analysts' forecasts compiled by the bank. The bank abandoned
its previous guidance to investors given the uncertain outlook
for the economy.
Lloyds is viewed as a bellwether for the British economy, as
the country's largest provider of home loans and one of its
biggest backers of businesses.
"We expect the Group will also experience further
impairments, both in existing and new lending books,
particularly if economic expectations deteriorate further from
the base case," the bank said.
The bank has provided 880,000 loan repayment holidays across
all its product lines and issued 3,752 loans with an aggregated
value of 500 million pounds to businesses under a
government-backed relief scheme.
But it is still lagging behind rivals RBS, HSBC
and Barclays in its use of the Coronavirus
Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS) to back firms, despite
being Britain's biggest provider of loans to small companies.
Lloyds has a 24% market share of relationships with small
business borrowers, data from business insights provider RFi
Group sent to Reuters shows. Rival RBS, with a 14% share, has
provided 1.4 billion pounds of CBILS loans, nearly three times
the value of Lloyds.
Lloyds' results would have been even worse but for a tax
credit of 406 million pounds in the period, which the bank said
was due to lower profits and an uplift from deferred tax assets.
HSBC and Barclays had already set aside billions of pounds
in quarterly results earlier this week to cover an expected
spike in bad loans due to the outbreak, with state-backed RBS
expected to follow suit on Friday.
($1 = 0.8013 pounds)
(Reporting by Iain Withers and Sinead Cruise, Editing by
Lawrence White)
