Rejected offer: Spanish bank BBVA wants to buy rival Banco Sabadell
Spanish bank BBVA has stepped up its bid to buy the owner of British high street lender TSB.
The Bilbao-based company took an offer of £10.5billion directly to Banco Sabadell’s shareholders after the board of its Spanish rival rejected the same proposal earlier in the week.
The move has triggered a rare hostile takeover battle where a predator puts its proposals in front of its target’s shareholders rather than directors.
Any deal would create the second-largest bank in Spain, behind Santander, worth more than £60billion.
But it would raise fresh questions over the future of TSB, which Sabadell bought in 2015 before it suffered an IT disaster in 2018 that saw it dubbed the Totally Shambolic Bank.
BBVA has said that TSB would add to its ‘global scale’ although it is not clear what a new owner’s plans would be.
‘We are presenting an extra-ordinarily attractive offer to create a bank with greater scale in one of our most important markets,’ said BBVA’s executive chairman Carlos Torres Vila.
It is the second attempt at a tie-up between BBVA and Sabadell. They called off merger talks in 2020 after failing to agree on terms, including the price.
TSB faced a backlash this week after it announced plans to shut another 36 branches in the UK – leaving it with just 175.
By the time the closures are complete, the bank will have axed 459 sites since 2015.