BANK of Scotland Ireland (BOSI) has received another €1bn capital injection from its parent as it grapples with continued loan losses, the Sunday Tribune has learned.

The bank's parent company, Lloyds Banking Group, topped up BOSI's capital base earlier in the last two weeks. The full details of the latest infusion will be made publicly available at the Companies Registration Office in the coming days.

BOSI, which has announced plans to close its retail banking network, has now received €4.45bn from Lloyds in the past two years. When the latest €1bn capital boost is added to previous top-ups, BOSI has now swallowed about a quarter of the total funds Lloyds Banking Group received from the British government to see it through the financial crisis. Lloyds is now 41% owned by UK taxpayers.

While Lloyds no longer provides detailed financial figures for its Irish division, it said in February that loan losses at BOSI in 2009 were €3.3bn, up from €604m in the previous year. While the wider Lloyds will return to profit this year, the Irish operations will still be a drag on the bank.

"Impairments continue at a high level, principally as a result of further provisions in Ireland relating to our commercial real estate portfolio; however, the level of impairments in the first quarter of 2010 was lower than the last quarter of 2009 and we continue to believe that we are past the peak for impairment losses in the division," it said in a trading statement last month.

BOSI said in February it would shut all of its Halifax branches this summer with the loss of 750 jobs. The voluntary redundancy programme is "heavily oversubscribed", according to Unite, which represents 1,000 BOSI workers.

The move came after an extensive strategic review, called 'Project Primrose', which the bank had started after the British government engineered the rescue of BOSI's Edinburgh-based parent, HBOS, by forcing it to merge with Lloyds TSB in 2008. Chief executive Joe Higgins had originally planned to shut the bank in September, but won a reprieve from Lloyds to explore other options for the Irish business.

The capital support given to BOSI by its parent now exceeds that provided by the Irish government to either AIB or Bank of Ireland, which have each received €3.5bn of taxpayers' money. BOSI's loan book is less than a quarter of the size of AIB's.

BOSI is not the only foreign lender in Ireland to lean on its parent company for support. The Sunday Tribune revealed in January that Ulster Bank, owned by the Royal Bank of Scotland Group, was propped up by another €175m, bringing its total capital injections to €2.3bn to cushion its property loan losses. And Dutch financial services group Rabobank, has pumped €450m into its ACC Bank subsidiary in the last couple of years.