Fortis sells ABN units to Deutsche

By Gilbert Kreijger

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Belgian-Dutch financial services group Fortis (FOR.AS)(FOR.BR) has agreed to sell about 10 percent of ABN AMRO's Dutch operations to Deutsche Bank (DBKGn.DE) for 709 million euros (564 million pounds).

Deutsche Bank will buy two units servicing large corporate clients, 13 commercial advisory branches for medium-sized clients, parts of Hollandsche Bank Unie N.V., and factoring services company IFN Finance, Fortis said on Wednesday.

Fortis needed to sell the operations to meet the antitrust demands of the European Commission after it bought ABN AMRO last year together with Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS.L) and Spain's Santander (SAN.MC) for a total of 70 billion euros.

The deal will make the German bank the fourth-largest provider of corporate and investment banking in the Netherlands.

Fortis said in a statement the sale price was about 300 million euros below the net asset value of the sold businesses.

The Belgian-Dutch group had indicated the price would be depressed by that amount when announcing measures to boost its solvency by 8 billion euros last Thursday. The measures, which included a capital hike, helped push its shares down by 19 percent.

The commercial banking businesses being sold serve more than 35,000 commercial business clients as well as 8,000 private clients, employ 1,400 people and made a pro forma pre-tax profit of about 140 million euros in 2007.

Jean-Paul Votron, Fortis's chief executive, said the sale was an essential step in completing Fortis's acquisition of the Dutch activities of ABN AMRO.