Just hours after the National Australia Bank (NAB) announced late on Tuesday that it had withdrawn from its bid to acquire ABN AMRO Australia Holdings, the Commonwealth Bank has confirmed that it has mounted a bid of its own.
The Commonwealth Bank said in a release issued on the Australian Securities Exchange that it was in discussions with Royal Bank of Scotland and that the proposal was incomplete, subject to further negotiation and signing a final binding agreement.
However, it said that it had entered a period of exclusivity around negotiations and due diligence and that the ABN AMRO Australian and New Zealand businesses would be complementary to the Commonwealth Bank’s already extensive institutional banking and markets business and would enhance the range of services that the bank offers in the financial markets area.
NAB, which had revealed it was in discussions with the Royal Bank of Scotland to acquire ABN AMRO, notified the Australian Securities Exchange just moments before the close of trading on Tuesday that it had withdrawn from the sale process.
It did not state why it had withdrawn from the process but, when revealing it was in negotiations for the acquisition, made plain that there was no certainty that a transaction would ultimately occur.
