BNP Paribas has contacted the Dutch government to discuss ABN Amro


BRUSSELS (Reuters) – BNP Paribas has informed the Dutch government of its interest in taking over state-owned bank ABN Amro, a deal that Amsterdam will not immediately follow up on, a close source said on Friday. folder.

The publication of a dispatch from the Bloomberg agency took off the title of the Dutch bank which took up 18.4% in session, causing a brief suspension of the title on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange.

He still gained 10.18% around 1:15 p.m. GMT, at the top of the Stoxx 600 while in Paris, BNP Paribas took 1.24% at the same time.

Contacted by Reuters, spokespersons for the two banks declined to comment.

A second source said that BNP was not engaged in a “process” of acquiring its Dutch rival and that such an operation would not correspond to its strategy.

In a press release, the Dutch Ministry of Finance says it has sought advice from NLFI, the agency that holds the government shares, on “the sale of other ABN Amro securities” without, however, commenting on the information disclosed by Bloomberg.

Since its bailout in 2008 by the Dutch state, ABN Amro has refocused its activities on its domestic market, eliminating thousands of jobs in the process. At the end of 2021, the bank only employed 20,000 full-time employees.

Partially privatized in 2015, the bank is still 56% owned by the State, which makes no secret of its desire to gradually withdraw from it. However, he has not put an ABN Amro share on the market since September 2017.

Amro, one of the three big banks in the Netherlands, announced in 2020 that it would end all its commodity finance activity after posting a loss of several million euros.

(Report Marine Strauss, Anthony Deutch, Bart Meijer, Toby Sterling, Julien Ponthus, Sudip Kar-Gupta; French version Nicolas Delame and Laetitia Volga, edited by Sophie Louet)



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