Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) grew exponentially in the boom years and crumbled just as fast in the wake of the financial crisis.

The 300-year-old bank's swift fall from grace came soon after it pronounced itself to be one of the world's biggest players.

Former boss Sir Fred Goodwin boasted RBS had vaulted "to the top of the premier league" with its part in the £49 billion deal to capture Dutch rival ABN Amro just over a year ago.

But the deal instead catapulted it towards disaster, and within months it was asking shareholders for £12 billion in the biggest rights issue in UK corporate history.

It was to be the first of several uncomfortable records for the bank, which soon found itself announcing its first losses in 40 years for the first half of 2008.

RBS now finds itself 70% owned by the Government after an unprecedented bail-out in which it was on the receiving end of £20 billion of public money. Its stock now lingers at a level not seen for 25 years and talk of nationalisation is never far away.

While RBS is by no means the only institution to have been brought to its knees by the financial turmoil, its position at the very heart of UK banking has meant the scale of its troubles is all the more devastating.

The firm's website proclaims: "Our history is very much the history of banking in the British Isles for the past four centuries."

Established in 1727 at a single branch in the Edinburgh Old Town, it was almost 60 years before RBS made its first tentative expansion - a new office in Glasgow in 1783. It was another 91 years before the first London branch was opened and the bank began to grow in England and Wales.

RBS began its international expansion in 1985 with the acquisition of Citizens Financial Group of Rhode Island in the US.

But it was not until after Sir Fred joined the business in 1998 that the firm moved into the ranks of the world elite - and away from its image as chiefly a high street bank.

Sir Fred masterminded a £21 billion takeover of NatWest in March 2000 - the biggest deal in UK banking history - and was lauded for his success.

And in 2004, a 10.5 billion US dollar (£5.3 billion) acquisition of US bank Charter One doubled the size of the Citizens business and elevated the local retail bank to one of the 10 largest commercial banks in the US.

Other buys included Direct Line car insurer Churchill and by this time Sir Fred had attracted accusations of empire-building and was under pressure from his own shareholders worried by the number of acquisitions made by the bank.

But it was the ABN deal, which RBS completed in conjunction with Fortis and Santander, which has been blamed for a large part of the bank's troubles.

Fears that it is exposed to further losses from toxic assets lurking in its US business and ABN have helped drag confidence in the business to rock bottom.

And not only has ABN contributed to the bank's write-downs, the cost of the deal also knocked its balance sheet.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown pointed the finger of blame at the ABN purchase when the bank announced its staggering losses last month.

"Today's write-off by the Royal Bank of Scotland is for irresponsible losses accumulated in American sub-prime markets that partly derive from the acquisition of the Dutch bank ABN Amro," he said.

The business was seized from the hands of rival Barclays at the very height of the market.

As the final papers were signed in October 2007, the Northern Rock crisis was already under way - the first icy blast of a storm that was to engulf the financial world.

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