Endemol, the producer of Big Brother, has emerged as the latest victim of the global credit crunch after the banks funding the group’s takeover became stuck with loans worth billions.

Endemol was acquired in May by a three-way consortium comprising Silvio Berlusconi’s Mediaset, the company founder John de Mol through his Cyrte Investments vehicle, and Goldman Sachs.

The banks that underwrote the deal - Goldman Sachs, ABN Amro, Barclays Capital, Credit Suisse, Lehman and Merrill Lynch - were due to go out to syndication to sell the debt on July 24. But that syndication has been postponed as debt investors refused to take part in high-risk buyouts.

“That’s a deal that just can’t get done right now,” said one banker who had advised a rival group on the Endemol sale.

The sale was one of the most high-profile auctions of the year and came amid controversies about racism on Celebrity Big Brother on Channel 4 in the UK and about a faked kidney donation on a TV programme in the Netherlands.

The consortium put together by Mr de Mol – who made his original fortune selling Endemol to Telefónica, the Spanish telecoms giant, at the height of the dot-com boom – won a closely fought battle by agreeing to pay €2.63 billion (£1.77 billion) for a 75 per cent stake in Endemol owned by Telefónica. They then launched a tender offer for the remaining 25 per cent of shares they did not own. That part of the deal is now close to completion and will not be affected by the syndication issue.

Such was the buzz around the sale that banks were offering huge multiples of debt to win the business and associated fees. As a result, the consortium’s winning bid was understood to include debt worth more than nine times Endemol’s last 12 months’ earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (ebitda), while the deal valued the whole business at 14.4 times ebitda.

The deal was agreed on May 13, in the height of a merger mania that was driving up purchase prices in an era of cheap and plentiful debt. But the markets have since turned sour as the crisis in the US sub-prime mortgage market has spilled over into the leveraged loan sector, wreaking havoc on a slew of deals that are underwritten but not yet syndicated.

Endemol’s problems follow a string of other stalled deals including the £9 billion sale of debt backing Kohlberg Kravis Roberts’s acquisition of Alliance Boots, while in the US some $250 billion (£125 billion) of deals have become stuck on banks’ balance sheets, waiting to be sold.

Royal Bank of Scotland, it emerged separately, has decided not to bother syndicating its $400 million loan to Apax-backed Incisive Media in respect of the recent purchase of the publisher American Laywer because it knows it cannot complete the transaction.

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