(Bloomberg) -- UK officials said NatWest Group Plc should provide clarity on its plans for installing a permanent chief executive officer in order to make it easier for the government to begin the process of using a retail offering to wind down its stake in the British lender.

UK Government Investments, the Treasury-owned company that holds the 35% stake in NatWest, has already hired advisers including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Barclays Plc for the work, said Holger Vieten, director of UKGI’s financial institutions group. The company could be ready to proceed with the offering as early as June, he said. 

But the timetable is complicated by the fact that NatWest doesn’t have a permanent CEO installed, according to Charles Donald, head of UKGI. Paul Thwaite has been running the lender since the abrupt departure of Alison Rose last year, but his 12-month term in the role ends in July. 

“They need to provide clarity to the market on their proposals around either confirming the interim chief executive or a process around appointing a permanent chief executive for the market to be comfortable,” Donald said at a parliamentary hearing on Tuesday. 

The UK government announced in November that it was weighing selling shares it holds in NatWest to retail investors for the first time, as part of its efforts to hasten its exit from the lender it rescued in the 2008 financial crisis. Since then, it has asked City of London firms to submit proposals to work on the potential offering, in what would be the country’s most high-profile privatization this year.

Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP is serving as legal advisor to UKGI, while Barclays is going to be retail coordinator for the sale, Vieten said. Goldman Sachs is acting as a strategy advisor for the privatization and the company also hired Solid Solutions, a consultancy that focuses on retail share offers.

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