Building society Skipton may mull B&B bid

LONDON (Reuters) - Skipton Building Society considered bidding for troubled mortgage lender Bradford & Bingley BB.L, Skipton's chief executive was quoted as saying by Financial World magazine.

"Skipton considered bidding for Bradford & Bingley," John Goodfellow, chief executive of the sixth-biggest building society said in the article.

He said B&B customers would have supported being a member of a society again and its brand was still strong, leaving the main issue whether a buyer could make the financials stack up and make enough money to service and reduce the debt taken on when buying it.

Goodfellow's article was written about 10 days ago and he said that U.S. private equity firm TPG "got there first with the money, so that opportunity has gone".

TPG pulled out of a deal to buy a 23 percent stake last Friday, however, forcing B&B to increase the size of a rights issue to 400 million pounds.

A spokesman for Skipton said on Tuesday the society wasn't interested in returning to look at B&B after TPG's retreat, as it wouldn't fit its plans.

Skipton, which has 82 branches, 600,000 customers and assets of over 10 billion pounds, would also be interested in looking at Northern Rock if the government decides to return it to the private sector and didn't want it to be publicly listed, Goodfellow said.

"I would love to do a mutualisation having lived through the demutualisation wave. A lot of nonsense has been talked about a business model that may now play to the times," he said.

(Reporting by Steve Slater; Editing by Erica Billingham)