Fortis, the troubled Belgo-Dutch bank, has continued its asset sale with news that it has sold a 49 per cent stake in Chinese joint venture AATEDA Fund Management to Old Mutual for €165 million in cash.

The sale of the stake, which had belonged to Dutch bank ABN Amro, was required by regulators after Fortis took on ABN’s asset management business in April this year. A consortium made up of Fortis, Britain’s Royal Bank of Scotland and Spain’s Santander, bought ABN last year in the biggest banking takeover in history.

AATEDA is a leading fund management company in China, which was founded in 2002. Its assets under management total €2.05 billion (£1.62 billion).

“This is a rare opportunity to buy a sizeable stake in a well-established and well-managed asset management business in the region,” Steffen Gilbert, president of Asia Pacific at Old Mutual, said.

The stake purchase represents Old Mutual's first significant step into Chinese asset management and is expected to provide a base on which the company can expand further in Asia.

The transaction is not expected to have a material impact on Fortis’s net profit per share and is expected to provide solvency relief of approximately half the cash consideration, the group said in a statement.

Fortis was forced to reassure investors that it was fully solvent last month after it scrapped its interim dividend in June and raised a further €1.5 billion of equity to boost its capital reserves.

Earlier this month, Fortis reported a 41 per cent drop in first-half profits. In July it caved in to shareholder pressure and announced that its chief executive, Jean-Paul Votron, was stepping down owing to problems related to the US sub-prime crisis.

The bank undertook Europe's second-largest rights issue, worth €13.4 billion, to fund its share of the ABN Amro acquisition.

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