RBS releases earnings early after shock swing to Q2 profit

LONDON, July 25 (Reuters) - Royal Bank of Scotland (LSE: RBS.L - news) said it made a pretax profit of 1 billion pounds ($1.7 billion) in the second quarter, far better than analysts had expected, due to a turnaround in losses from bad loans, prompting it to release its earnings a week early.

State-backed RBS said the sharply better-than-expected profits were mainly because of an improvement in the UK economy, which allowed it to write back losses that had been booked on some bad loans, so it had a net release of 93 million pounds.

That compared to 1.1 billion pounds of impairments in the second quarter of last year, and expectations from analysts that it would book impairments of about 500 million pounds. ($1 = 0.5884 British Pounds) (Reporting by Steve Slater; Editing by David Holmes)