The takeover of ABN Amro bank in 2007 was ‘clearly a big mistake’, the new head of Royal Bank of Scotland says in an interview with German paper Welt am Sonntag.

RBS, then under the leadership of Fred Goodwin, led a consortium of three banks which bought ABN Amro for €71bn and then broke it up.
But new RBS CEO Stephen Hester told the German paper Goodwin did not have a proper strategy and bought up whatever he could. And the purchase of ABN Amro was a mistake from ‘both a financial and a strategic’ perspective.
The start of the financial crisis shortly after the takeover weakened RBS so much it had to be bailed out by the British taxpayer and is now largely in government hands. Most of ABN Amro’s Dutch operations have also been nationalised.