ABN Amro: Endgame near for $101B deal

LONDON (CNNMoney.com) -- The biggest banking deal ever is poised to close as shareholders of Dutch bank ABN Amro are expected to back a $101 billion takeover by a group led by Royal Bank of Scotland.

The approval would bring an end to a saga that pitted British bank Barclays (Charts) against a consortium made up of RBS, Belgian-Dutch group Fortis and Spanish bank Santander.

Barclays on Friday withdrew its bid for ABN after its offer failed to win 80 percent acceptance from ABN shareholders, leaving the mostly cash bid from the RBS group.

Under the RBS takeover, ABN (Charts) will be broken up and its businesses will be split up among the members of the consortium.

Recent turmoil in financial markets has slowed deal activity, and the ABN fight draws to a close at a time when mega-deals are likely to become rare.

The booming merger market hit a snag in the third quarter. Worldwide volume in September fell to $217.4 billion, the lowest month since November 2005, according to deal tracker Dealogic.

The battle for ABN began when merger activity was still robust. ABN, under pressure by activist shareholders to sell or break itself up, agreed in April to be taken over by Barclays.

In Barclays, ABN found a suitor that would have allowed it to stay intact. In an effort to discourage other bids, ABN sold its U.S. unit LaSalle Bank to Bank of America (Charts, Fortune 500).

But rival bidders were not deterred. After ABN announced the all-stock offer from Barclays, the RBS consortium made a higher, mostly cash bid and began a legal fight to block the LaSalle sale. The sale of LaSalle to Bank of America closed on Oct. 1.

The battle continued into the summer, with Barclays teaming up with the China Development Bank and Singapore's Temasek Holdings to sweeten its offer in July by injecting cash into its bid.

But in the ensuing months, Barclays stock was hammered by the credit crunch, lowering the value of Barclays' mostly stock bid to about $85 billion from $93 billion in July.