ABN Amro: Italian job

Is ABN Amro really serious about buying Banca Antonveneta to forestall a merger between it and Banca Popolare di Lodi? That’s certainly the message the Dutch bank is trying to telegraph. Its shareholders can only hope it’s a bluff. A takeover of the Italian bank would be hard for ABN to justify on shareholder value grounds. Look at the numbers. Antonveneta has a stand-alone value of about E5.5bn. Yet to buy it, the Dutch might have to cough up as much as E7bn. That’s a premium of E1.5bn. To j...