Monday 14 July 2008

"Santander agrees A&L takeover"

Woo hoo!

When I first covered this, A&L's market cap was £2 bn, so Santander seem to have timed this right (they've offered £1.2 bn).

So, Alliance & Leicester aren't going to spoil my winning streak - unless this goes sour like the mooted Texas Pacific Group/Bradford & Bingley deal, of couse.

Update, as JonB points out "... if your combined savings in Abbey and A&L exceed £35k, you need to move some elsewhere as soon as possible."

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

So if the new combo goes belly up, it'll be the Spanish government that "steps in", I suppose? Using what: money from Frankfurt?

Mark Wadsworth said...

D, that's the puzzling part. Firstly, this is a share-for-share deal, so the headline price is illusory. Secondly, it is widely believed that as Spain is in Euro-zone, there isn't actually a central bank that can prop it up (under EU rules against state aid and so on).

Bill Quango MP said...

A+L is a 'partner' bank for the Post Office.
I wonder if this will continue.

Also, how come it was kept so quiet?
I saw my financial manager from A+L in February. He was going on about the strength of their assets, solid mortgage book and the lines of new credit they had negotiated so they were totally financed.So I was reassured.

Reassured that they were in the proverbial.