Bank group ABN Amro reported a third-quarter net loss of a billion euros (1.5 billion dollars) on Wednesday, a sharp improvement from the outcome in the previous quarter.
The figures included a 32-million-euro loss for the Dutch state which gave the bank a three-billion-euro cash boost last week.
This brought the bank’s losses for the first nine months of the year to 3.6 billion euros, the group said in a statement.
A loss of 873 million euros in the third quarter accrued to the parts of ABN Amro’s business acquired by the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), it added.
“The results of the RBS acquired businesses continue to be impacted by financial and credit market volatility and business transfers,” said the statement.
The third-quarter results were an improvement on the 1.8-billion-euro loss recorded in the second quarter.
ABN Amro was acquired in 2007 by a consortium grouping RBS, Santander and the Dutch-Belgian banking and insurance group Fortis.
Its Dutch banking activities were nationalised by the Dutch state in October last year following the break-up of Fortis, which had been badly burned in the global finance crisis.
ABN Amro Group said it was making “good progress on the separation into two independent banks, the future ABN Amro Bank NV owned by the Dutch state and the future RBS NV owned by the RBS Group.”
It planned to complete the demerger “as early as possible in the first quarter of 2010.”
“ABN Amro Group and its shareholders have plans in place to ensure that at legal separation each individual bank is adequately capitalised and has a sound liquidity position.”
The group said it expected to make a loss of 800 to 900 million euros in the fourth quarter from selling its subsidiaries HBU and IFN Finance to Germany’s biggest bank, Deutsche Bank — a European Commission condition for the ABN Amro-Fortis merger.
This amount included a provision for credit guarantees.
In May, ABN Amro announced that it would cut 4,000-5,000 jobs from a total workforce of 30,000 by 2012 as part of a merger with Fortis Netherlands.
