Lloyds completes £335m sale of stake in Standard Life Aberdeen

The sell-off, which is worth about £355m at Thursday’s closing price, comes as Lloyds and Standard Life Aberdeen remain locked in a dispute resolution proceedings after Lloyds terminated its £109bn Scottish Widows Investment Partnership management deal with Standard Life Aberdeen in February.

Aberdeen Asset Management acquired SWIP in 2014, but Lloyds now sees it as a rival since its merger with Standard Life.

That deal saw Lloyds gain a 9.9 per cent of Aberdeen, which was diluted to 3.3 per cent after last year’s merger with Standard Life manager.

In a stock exchange announcement this morning, Lloyds confirmed that it had sold its remaining stake in Standard Life Aberdeen, worth £344m or 3.3 per cent of Standard Life Aberdeen’s ordinary shares.

A decision is set to be made in the summer over the future of the SWIP mandate, with BlackRock, JPMorgan Asset Management and Schroders understood to have made it to the second round of bidding

Earlier this month it emerged that Goldman Sachs had also entered the frame to bid for the mandate.