Abbey National Plc has agreed to sell asset finance and leasing businesses to a unit of ING Groep NV, as it concentrates on consumer banking in Britain.
The three businesses being sold are Asset Finance, Country Finance and Vendor Finance and mainly lend to small- and medium- sized companies (SMEs). They employ 243 people who, Abbey said, will be transferred to ING.
In a Regulatory News Service statement, London-based Abbey said the units sold to ING have assets of Ј863 million (Ђ1.315 billion). Matt Young, an Abbey spokesman, declined to say whether ING had agreed to pay a premium for the assets.
Chief executive Luqman Arnold, the former UBS AG president who took over in October 2002, is returning Abbey to its consumer-banking roots after an expansion into corporate lending led to the first annual loss in the bank's 154-year history in 2002.
