The works council at Fortis Nederland has called for a temporary halt to the integration between the financial services group and ABN Amro, the Financieele Dagblad reports on Tuesday.

A halt would remove the immediate need to find units to sell off, as the European Commission is demanding on competition grounds, the works council said.
‘The continuation of the integration… in the current economic situation is not in the interests of the banks, the shareholders, politicians and the workers we represent,’ the paper quoted the works council statement as saying.
The council said it remains in favour of the merger plan but ‘not at any price’.
Efforts to find a buyer for parts of the bank have so far failed.
Finance minister Wouter Bos wants to merge the two banks, both nationalised, into a single unit. Brussels has given Bos a new deadline of October 19 to come up with a buyer for enough units to remove fears about market dominance.