Jul. 21--Spain's Banco de Sabadell, in a bid to expand its Florida presence, is expected to announce that it is acquiring Miami-based Mellon United National Bank, a person familiar with the transaction said Monday.

Miami-based Mellon United, a commercial bank, has assets of about $2billion and 15 offices in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties. It is a unit of giant Bank of New York Mellon, which has been selling off commercial banking operations to focus on wealth management and private banking.

Spanish banks, in turn, have been snapping up Florida institutions in recent years to provide a base for their operations in Latin America and to service Spanish companies doing business in the United States.

Mid-size Spanish bank Banco Popular Espanol bought Miami-based TotalBank in November 2007 for $300million, and Miami banker Leonard Abess Jr. sold an 83percent stake in City National Bancshares to savings bank Caja Madrid for $927million last November.

Despite the global financial crisis, Spanish banks have been in a relatively strong position because they didn't buy subprime mortgage instruments.

PRICE UNCERTAIN

It isn't clear how much Mellon United will fetch in the current depressed economic environment, in which banks are generally out of favor.

Dow Jones News Newswires reported Monday that one source put the price at just below $200million. That would be about half of the $400million that Bankof New York Mellonpaid for the Miamiinstitution when it acquired it from Miami banker Gerald Katcher in 1998.

Sabadell already owns Miami-based Transatlantic Bank. Officials at Transatlantic couldn't be reached late Monday for comment.

Merrett Stierheim, a director at Mellon United, declined to comment on the negotiations.

Mellon merged with Bank of New York in July 2007. Since that combination, the giant bank has been shedding commercial banking operations as it concentrated its efforts on asset and wealth management.

CO-FOUNDER OUSTED

In January, Bank of New York Mellon dispatched a top executive to Miami to fire Katcher, the chairman and a Miami banking veteran who had helped found the Florida bank 30 years ago.

Katcher's relationship with the holding company appeared to have deteriorated after an investors group he organized to buy the Florida Mellon unit from Bank of New York shelved its plans.

Three directors of the Miami bank board promptly resigned in protest. They included Dr. Pedro Greer; David Lawrence Jr., president of the Early Childhood Initiative and former publisher of The Miami Herald; and Sherwood M. "Woody" Weiser, chairman and chief executive of Continental Cos.

Katcher and a business associate, Howard R. Scharlin, started the bank in 1978 by acquiring a small unit of Southeast Bank, but by 1998 it had grown to more than $800million in assets.

Katcher and Scharlin sold the bank to Mellon for $400million and Katcher stayed on to run it locally before his ouster.

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