The government should have intervened to halt the break-up of the ABN Amro banking group following its takeover by a Royal Bank of Scotland-led consortium, former board chairman Jan Kalff said on Thursday.
Kalff was appearing before a government committee set up to look at the cause of the banking crisis and its effect on the Dutch economy.
Kalff said ministers had failed to realise how damaging the break-up would be to the Dutch economy. The Netherlands would have been in a better position had the group remained intact, he said.
Earlier, Aarnout Loudon, who chaired ABN Amro’s supervisory board between 1996 and 2006, told the committee that other countries would not have allowed ABN Amro to be taken over and broken up.
Central bank
And it is incomprehensible that the central bank gave the green light to the take-over, he said.
Central bank president Nout Wellink and finance minister Wouter Bos were shocked by the European Commission’s reaction to their doubts, news agency ANP quoted him as saying.
‘They were pulled up hard by [commissioner Charlie] McGreevy. But it was of course very dangerous to split up the bank,’ he said.
The ABN Amro group was taken over and split up by RBS, Fortis and the Spanish bank Santander in 2007 in a €71bn deal.
In 2008, the Dutch state took over the parts of ABN Amro acquired by Fortis after the collapse of the Dutch-Belgium banking and insurance group.
