Under-pressure Groenink ditches Shell move

RIJKMAN Groenink, the beleaguered chief executive of ABN Amro, yesterday bowed to shareholder pressure and asked for his nomination to British-Dutch oil major Royal Dutch Shell to be withdrawn.

The oil company said it would accept Groenink's request and remove the resolution from its list of proposals for an annual shareholders meeting to be held today.

Shell said in a statement: "The reason for his decision is that he wants to fully dedicate his attention to ABN AMRO, given the current corporate activities around the company."

Groenink's decision came as John Varley, chief executive of Barclays, one of the suitors for ABN, told a New York conference that his group had learnt the lessons from what he admitted was an inadequate integration of Woolwich, which Barclays acquired for 5.4 billion in 2000. Varley told the UBS Global Financial Services conference in New York that Barclays did not manage the integration of Woolwich well, and did not create the returns on capital it should have got out of the deal.

He said: "We were more interested in synergy capture than in underlying performance. It's very clear to me that was a mistake."

But Varley said the bank had "learnt a lot of lessons as a result of our experience in the Woolwich" and had applied them in later takeovers like Banco Zaragozano in Spain and Absa in South Africa.

Of the Zaragozano deal, he said: "We made changes to the management structure immediately, we disposed of non-core assets within six weeks, and we achieved systems integration within the first year of ownership."

Varley's comments follow the RBS consortium stressing its expertise in acquisition integration.