Elsevier.nl has the news that ABN AMRO will challenge the Enterprise Court ruling forbidding it to sell LaSalle without asking shareholders. Which basically means that ABN AMRO is now on a course to make the whole takeover a litigation mess, so messy that no one dare enter and bid for them any more. Meanwhile they won't cooperate with the RBS Consortium in an effort not to help them prepare clarity for the outside world as to the details of their plans. And my guess is that this strategy might just work.
In the meantime there appears to be an increasing flow of customers thinking about leaving the bank. Most of them appear to go to Rabobank (which due to its cooperative structure, cannot be taken over). And newspaper the Telegraaf threw some oil on the fire in an article (implying that ABN AMRO would not survive a sort of bank run if all customers move to different banks). Which made Mr Wellink (supervisor/central bank director) assure the public that its funds were safe at ABN AMRO.
As a final reassurance the chair of ABN AMRO Netherlands, Mr JP Schmittman, will be reassuring the public in a nationwide advertisment containing a letter to the public. He explains that the outcome of all the discussion cannot be anticipated. Yet, regardless of the outcome, ABN AMRO and its employees will be continuing servicing their customers. And these customers can either contact their regular contactperson or send him a personal e-mail.
So would this letter mean that there are more than just a couple of dozen customers that are leaving the bank?
