RBS Philip Hampton
Reuters

The Royal Bank of Scotland's chairman Sir Philip Hampton has allegedly signed the papers to jump ship and move to Britain's biggest pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline.

According to a number of media reports that have trickled out from August until 24 September, Hampton is set to join GSK imminently, after the drugmaker was stung with a £300m (€384m, $490m) fine related to the bribery of Chinese officials.

RBS has not returned with a comment at the time of publication.

Hampton was appointed to the board on 19 January 2009, and to the position of Chairman on 3 February 2009, only one year after the lender received £45bn in bailout cash.

Hampton has also managed to avoid the chopping block over the years despite former chief executive Stephen Hester being ousted after five years at the bank, following a raft of market manipulation scandals and mis-selling issues that happened under his watch.

Prior to RBS, Hampton was the chairman of J Sainsbury, group finance director at Lloyds TSB Group, BT Group plc, BG Group, British Gas and British Steel, an executive director of Lazards and a non-executive director of RMC Group and Belgacom.

He is also a former chairman of UK Financial Investments Limited, which manages the UK government's shareholdings in banks.

Meanwhile, GSK is on the cusp of identifying its successor for long term CEO Sir Andrew Witty who apologised last week for GSK staff committing mass bribery across in China.

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