L&G completes sale of Dutch arm

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L&G completes sale of Dutch arm

Legal & General has completed the sale of its Netherlands arm to a European life and pensions consolidator.

The €161m (£137m) deal with Chesnara is part of L&G’s plans to rid itself of “non-core” businesses and focus on growth markets.

In a statement issued this morning (6 April) L&G stated it wanted to concentrate on markets where it could achieve “significant scale” and deliver “attractive returns” to its shareholders.

This is just the latest division that L&G has sold off in the past few years, with its offshore bond operation sold to Canada Life’s parent company Great-West Lifeco in February 2015.

Last year it completed talks with Apicil to sell its French business and sold Suffolk Life to Curtis Banks, while it disposed of Legal & General Ireland and Legal & General Egypt in 2015.

And in August it agreed to sell platform Cofunds to Aegon UK for £140m after months of speculation.

The deal to sell its Dutch arm has given L&G a "small" profit and improved its coverage ratio "marginally".

Legal & General Netherlands was established in 1984 and offers adviser-led risk and investment-linked products, sold through independent financial advisers, serving high-end affluent customers.

It also has an established defined contribution group pension platform focused on Dutch SMEs.

It has more than 210,000 policyholders, funds under management are €2.1bn (£1.7bn), and it wrote protection gross written premiums of €63m (£53m) in 2016.

damian.fantato@ft.com