London - Britain's Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) Tuesday announced a drastic cut in bonus payments to staff, following intensive talks with the government on the vexed issue of cash bonuses.

The Edinburgh-based bank, which is nearly 70-per-cent-owned by the taxpayer, said it would slash 2008 staff bonuses by more than 90 per cent to 175 million pounds (249 million dollars).

Last year, RBS paid out 2.5 billion in bonuses for work performed in 2007. For 2008, it had planned to award bonuses totalling around 1 billion pounds.

Amsterdam  - Dutch insurer Aegon suffered a loss of 1.2 billion euros (1.53 billion dollars) in the fourth quarter of 2009, the company said in its preliminary Q4 report released on Tuesday.

Financial analysts had expected a loss of 800 million euros.

Following the publication of the results, the share value of Aegon dropped by 3.1 per cent at the Amsterdam stock exchange and stood at 3.6 euros shortly after trading began on Tuesday.

Warsaw - Poland's National Bank warned on Monday against moving closer to adopting the euro, saying that at present there were few economic reasons to enter the precursory stage for adopting the euro.

It was "highly uncertain" that Poland could meet the criteria to stay in ERM-2, a pre-cursor program to joining the eurozone, said the report, released on Monday.

A qualifying country is required to spend at least two years in ERM-2 and run a budget deficit at no more than 3 per cent of the GDP.

London  - The financially strapped Royal Bank of Scotland is considering a cost-cutting programme that could mean reducing its work force by as many as 20,000 people, reported the Sunday Times.

The bank, which has already been partially nationalized in the fallout from the ongoing financial crisis, is planning the cost- cutting effort before the release of a report at the end of February that is expected to show another loss of 28 billion pounds (40.4 billion dollars).

Wiesbaden, Germany  - A further German banking group, the mortgage lender Aareal, asked Sunday to be partly nationalized by the German government as it struggles to cope with the financial crisis.

In a statement from its head office in the city of Wiesbaden, Aareal said it had obtained an equity injection of 525 million euros (682 million dollars) and up to 4 billion euros in cover from federal loan guarantees, as set out in German bail-out legislation.

Amman  - The Arab Bank Group, one of the Arab world's largest banking establishments, managed to increase its net profits after tax by 8.4 per cent in 2008, to 840 million dollars, the group's chairman Abdul Hamid Shoman said Saturday.

"The figure represents the best results to be posted by the group since its establishment in 1930 despite the fluctuations in prices and production costs that were triggered by the global financial crisis" in the last quarter of 2008, he added.