Kleinwort Benson, one of the City of London’s oldest and venerable names has a new owner — a Belgian industrial holding company.
But please bear with us because this could be interesting.
The buyer is RHJ Holdings, a Euronext-listed group which readers may recall was trying to acquire a stake in Opel over the summer. Its chief executive is Leonhard Fischer, the former high-flying Credit Suisse and Dresdner executive.
And from Thursday’s press release it is pretty clear that RHJ intends to use Kleinwort as a consolidation vehicle to build a old fashioned merchant bank.
Here’s Leonhard:
Kleinwort Benson is an internationally respected brand in banking and its private banking operation provides a first class service to its clients. This is an important strategic investment for RHJI in a very attractive market sector. Furthermore RHJI plans to adopt Kleinwort Benson as an overarching brand for its financial services businesses going forward.
Indeed, Kleinwort does not really bring much more than a name: £5.4bn of assets under management is peanuts in the world of fund management.
So what might Leonhard look to buy? At the moment the idea seems to be to acquire the non-core assets Europe’s big banks are expected to divest over the next couple of years as they seek to repair their battered balance sheets.
In fact that is already happening. Only this morning Lloyds announced it was in talks to sell its Bank of Scotland portfolio management service to Rathbone Brothers. And Lloyds will have to make further disposals if it wants to withdraw completely from the government’s asset protection scheme.
Related link:
The £25bn question – FT Alphaville