Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and ABN Amro traded blows yesterday over whether the takeover battle between an RBS-led consortium and Barclays for the Dutch bank was being conducted on a level playing field.

Sir Fred Goodwin, RBS’s chief executive, accused ABN of ignoring his requests for meetings, a charge that ABN denied.

Meanwhile, Rijkman Groenink, ABN’s chief executive, spoke out against a capital raising that is vital to the consortium’s €71.1 billion (£47.8 billion), 93 per cent cash offer for ABN.

The rising tension came as RBS and ABN awaited Barclays’ formal offer for the Dutch bank on Monday. Sir Fred, speaking at RBS’s interim results presentation yesterday, said that ABN had not yet replied to a letter sent this week in which he had asked for access to more of ABN’s management.

His comments came after Mr Groenink told Dutch newspapers that shareholders in Fortis, RBS’s consortium partner, would be “well advised” to vote against the Belgian bank’s €13 billion capital raising on Monday. If the rights issue should fail, it will boost Barclays’s rival €67.5 billion, 37 per cent cash informal offer for the Dutch bank.

Mr Groenink said that the issue was for Fortis shareholders to decide, but that in his opinion the Belgian bank was “paying too much for ABN Amro”.

He was speaking days after ABN withdrew its formal recommendation for the Barclays merger proposal and said that it would “further engage with both parties with the aim of continuing to ensure a level playing field”.

Sir Fred said that he was “bemused” by Mr Groenink’s comments: “We wrote to them to ask for more access to more people and so we were surprised to see this as their first response.”

However, a spokesman for ABN said that there was an “open invitation to the consortium to establish a dialogue”. “We have repeatedly written to them to set a date for a meeting,” he said.

The row distracted attention from RBS’s strong first-half results. The bank unveiled a pretax profit of £5 billion for the six months to June 30, an 11 per cent rise. Operating profit at the bank’s corporate markets division rose 16 per cent to £3.1 billion.

Johnny Cameron, the head of corporate markets, said that he expected the unease in the credit sector to settle within a few months.

The downturn in the market for securitised sub-prime lending contributed to a 23 per cent fall in income at the bank’s American asset-backed lending business. The US business’s earnings were also hit by the dollar-sterling exchange rate.

RBS paid out £81 million in the first half to customers who claimed refunds on unathorised overdraft charges. Sir Fred gave warning that it was too early to assume that the problem had been resolved. The bank was also hit by £125 million-worth of claims from the June floods and said that the bill was likely to be similar from the downpour last month.

Collins Stewart, which expects the consortium to win ABN, said that the bank’s stock was too cheap and gave it a short-term “buy” recommendation.

Barclays said in a US regulatory filing yesterday that it would spend about £311 million on advisory fees and other expenses if it won the fight for ABN. The bank said that it would ask its shareholders to vote on the deal on September 14.

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