The Royal Bank of Scotland got serious in its attempt to awkwardly cut in on the marriage dance of ABN Amro and Barclays Bank today, submitting a $96.4 billion hostile unsolicited takeover offer today and a $24.5 billion offer for LaSalle, its Chicago-based banking unit. And ABN remained adamant in its refusal to take RBS for a swing across the dance floor.
The RBS offers top the deals ABN already has in the works to sell LaSalle to the Bank of America for $21 billion and everything else to Barclays for $87.1 billion. ABN said it would submit both offers to shareholders without endorsing them—in other words, it rejected RBS’s advances. Although the offers were higher, it said that the conditions attached to both offers and uncertainty about financing rendered both “not superior” to the Barclays and Bank of America bids.

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