Barclays Bank has conceded defeat in the seventh-month battle for Dutch lender ABN Amro as a rival bid led by Royal Bank of Scotland moved in to clinch the world's biggest bank takeover.
The outcome of the fight for the biggest bank in the Netherlands was widely expected after a fall in the Barclays share price saw its bid slip behind the €71 billion mostly cash offer from the RBS consortium.
In a statement, Barclays said it had received only 0.2 per cent of ABN shares by the time its offer closed yesterday.
Barclays was originally the preferred suitor as it planned to keep the business whole, but ABN switched to a neutral stance after the gap between the two bids widened.
Barclays will receive a €200 million "break fee" from ABN, which the bank said significantly exceeds the cost of the bid.
The offer from RBS and its partners - Dutch-Belgian Fortis and Spain's Banco Santander - expired at 2 pm.
The result will not be immediate, however, as shares are due to be counted over the weekend. The group has until next Wednesday to detail the result of the tender, and until the end of the week to declare the offer unconditional.
Attention will then turn to the consortium's mammoth task of breaking up ABN, which has more than 4,500 branches across 53 countries, integrating its businesses and delivering cost savings to prove it has not overpaid.