Royal Bank of Scotland is in talks to buy the investment portfolio of Cheyne Finance, the collapsed $6.6 billion (£3.25 billion) structured investment vehicle (SIV).

Receivers at Deloitte said yesterday that RBS planned to transfer the assets from Cheyne to a new SIV, which would be funded in part by the troubled vehicle’s existing investors.

“The action follows detailed discussion with a number of different bidders over the past few weeks and after consultation with the informal creditors’ committees,” Deloitte said.

Goldman Sachs, the investment bank, was thought to have been one of four banks that were interested in the SIV.

RBS’s bid is understood to have been sufficiently high to repay owners of Cheyne’s commercial paper and make some repayments to the holders of the SIV’s mezzanine debt.

Last week Cheyne became the first fund of its kind to stop making payments to investors holding its commercial paper because the SIV had breached insolvency tests. The decision by the High Court to allow payments to stop is thought to have helped the receivers to finalise a sale because it let them reach an agreement with all Cheyne’s debt-holders.

Deloitte has been trying to dispose of Cheyne’s assets since the start of September, when the SIV was hit by the closure of the market for asset-backed securities.

Much of the securities held within SIVs are backed by mortgages or collateralised debt obligations, both of which were affected by problems in the American sub-prime mortgage market and subsequent global credit crisis. Many investors, fearful of the quality of the SIVs’ assets, refused to roll-over the short-term debt that they had lent to the funds, depleting the vehicles’ resources as they paid out to lenders.

The fund, which is managed by Cheyne Capital, the $12 billion London-based hedge fund manager, had hoped for assistance from MLEC, the $75 billion “super-SIV” being set up by American banks to buy the assets of embattled SIVs to prevent fire-sales. MLEC is not expected to start making acquisitions for two months, however.

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