The chairman of Bank of America said his company had no plans to sweeten its bid of 21 billion dollars for US competitor LaSalle, a subsidiary of Dutch bank ABN Amro, in an interview to be published Monday.
"We have a contract in which ABN Amro guarantees that we can take over LaSalle without the approval of the shareholders," Ken Lewis told German business daily Handelsblatt. ABN Amro agreed to sell off LaSalle as part of a friendly 67-billion euro (91-billion dollar) take-over by British bank Barclays in a bid to scare off three European suitors led by Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS). The European consortium has said it would offer 72 billion euros but wants LaSalle to remain within the ABN Amro group.
A Dutch court froze the sale of LaSalle earlier this month by saying that ABN Amro shareholders should be allowed to vote on it first. Lewis defended a lawsuit that Bank of America filed this month against ABN in the US courts for breach of the agreement to sell LaSalle. "Selling to another party - such as RBS - would cost us a billion dollars, which we would have been able to make through the acquisition and the integration into our bank," he said, in remarks printed in German.
Any take-over of ABN Amro, by the consortium or Barclays, is set to be the biggest banking merger in history. On May 7, the consortium of RBS, Spanish Banco Santander and Belgian-Dutch Fortis announced that they had made a separate 24.5 billion-dollar offer for LaSalle that was rejected by ABN Amro.
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