Spanish financial giant Banco Santander is to sell property assets worth some EUR 4 bn in a lease-back deal to help finance its part of a consortium bid for Dutch bank ABN Amro. On Wednesday, a spokesperson for the Spanish bank confirmed a report in Spanish newspaper El Pais that Banco Santander has been briefing investors and analysts about the property sale during meetings on the ABN bid.
Spanish financial giant Banco Santander is to sell property assets worth some EUR 4 bn in a lease-back deal to help finance its part of a consortium bid for Dutch bank ABN Amro. On Wednesday, a spokesperson for the Spanish bank confirmed a report in Spanish newspaper El Pais that Banco Santander has been briefing investors and analysts about the property sale during meetings on the ABN bid.
Banco Santander has teamed up with the Royal Bank of Scotland and Dutch-Belgian bank Fortis to counter a EUR 67 bn bid by Barclays, the third-largest bank in the UK, for ABN Amro. Banco Santander spokesperson Peter Greiff told PropertyEU that the bank would go ahead with the sale-and-leaseback deal regardless of the ABN Amro bid. 'We would have done it anyway,' he said.
El Pais reported that the sale of the assets could yield capital gains of EUR 1.4 bn. In April, HSBC, the second-largest bank in the world by assets, sold its Canary Wharf headquarters in London to Spanish property company Metrovacesa in a lease-back deal for EUR 1.6 bn.