Forked over

17 February 2004 By Rob Cox Follow @rob1cox

A bevy of British banks ran their slide rules over GreenPoint Financial, which was sold to rival North Fork. Their shareholders should be thankful for such failure. The New York lender fetched a nosebleeding 3.4 times book value.

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North Fork Bancorp and GreenPoint Financial agreed to merge in a $6.3bn allstock transaction.

The combined group will have over $50bn in assets, $30bn in deposits and some 340 branches. Under the terms of the agreement, GreenPoint shareholders will receive 1.0514 shares of North Fork common stock for each GreenPoint share held, valuing GreenPoint shares at $46 based on North Fork's closing price on Friday.

A handful of European banks, including HSBC, BNPP, ABN Amro, Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland have been considering acquisitions to strengthen their existing US banking and credit franchises.

North Fork said it expects to generate over $1.5bn in pretax income in the first full year of combined operations. The companies cost savings of more than $100m.

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