British bank HBOS is considering a surprise counter-bid for Abbey National, which last week accepted a take-over from Spain's Santander Central Hispano, a report said on Sunday.
HBOS is pondering an offer slightly over the 8.9 billion pounds (13.5 billion euros, 16.4 billion dollars) Abbey agreed with the Spanish group, the Sunday Telegraph newspaper reported.
An unnamed banker told the paper that HBOS had a dedicated team looking into whether or not to bid for Abbey, like HBOS a home loan specialist.
"There's a good chance it will happen, but it's not definite," the banker told the paper.
Another source, identified as an executive "with a close knowledge of HBOS", said Abbey National shareholders had sent a clear message that they wanted to see the counter-bid happen.
"The big institutions have told us that they don't want Santander's shares," the executive said, referring to the Spanish bank's cash and shares offer.
"They would much rather see an all-UK deal funded by our shares."
Britain's so-called "big four" banks, HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays and Lloyds TSB, would have very little chance of getting approval from competition regulators to bid for Abbey National, the paper said.
In contrast, HBOS - formed by the merger of home-loan specialist Halifax and Bank of Scotland three years ago - had far more of a hope.
In a statement to the London Stock Exchange on Monday, Abbey National said Spain's largest bank would pay one new SCH share and a special cash dividend of 31 pence for each Abbey share, subject to shareholder approval.
The deal would create the fourth-biggest bank in Europe by market capitalisation - behind HSBC, the Royal Bank of Scotland and UBS - and the eighth-biggest world-wide.
Comments
Comments are closed.