GE closes sale of some European finance units
BOSTON, Jan 8 (Reuters) - General Electric Co (GE.N) has completed the sale of some of its European consumer finance businesses to Spain's Banco Santander SA (SAN.MC).
GE also said on Thursday that as part of the deal, it had completed the purchase of Italian corporate bank Interbanca SpA from Santander.
Each transaction was worth about 1 billion euros ($1.36 billion).
The deal, reached last June, is in line with the U.S. conglomerate's goals of making its GE Capital finance business less dependent on volatile consumers. GE Capital has been hammered by the credit crunch and weighed on the parent company's overall results last year.
GE sold its GE Money units in Germany, Austria and Finland, its UK credit card and automotive finance businesses, and its Irish credit card arm. The units sold had about $11 billion (8.1 billion euros) in assets, accounting for about one-tenth of GE's European consumer-finance business, according to a GE spokesman.
GE, the world's largest maker of jet engines and electricity-generating turbines, last year sold its Japanese consumer finance unit but abandoned an effort to sell its $30 billion U.S. private-label credit-card arm, finding no attractive buyers in the face of a sharp economic downturn. (Reporting by Scott Malone; editing by John Wallace)
