The Bank of Bermuda's takeover by multinational bank HSBC will result an unspecified number of job losses, said president and CEO Henry Smith, yesterday.

In joint press conference with HSBC to announce the $1.3 billion deal yesterday morning, Mr. Smith said he could not put a number on the job losses but said they would be made over three years and would have happened despite the sale. He added that cuts would be "meaningful".

"While there will be reduction in staff levels, those are unavoidable and would have occurred regardless (of the sale)," he said.

Yesterday Mr. Smith said the level of cut backs to come would not be known until both the bank and HSBC sat down and looked at their combined operations.

However, Mr. Smith said the bank hoped to minimise the negative impact of job losses through natural attrition: "Over three years there will be natural attrition," he said. The Bank of Bermuda's rate of attrition last year, based on voluntary leavers from January to December, 2002, was 10.74 percent in Bermuda and 13.43 percent on a global basis.

Mr. Smith stressed that staff redundancies were to take place across the group with the Bank of Bermuda having offices in Bermuda, in the Cayman Islands, New York, Bahrain, Dublin, Geneva, Guernsey, Isle of Man, Jersey, London, Luxembourg, Cook Islands, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore and South Africa.

About 40 percent of the bank's total workforce of 3,000, are based in Bermuda with some 1,200 posts locally.

Yesterday's announcement follows the bank already streamlining its staffing levels with 43 positions - 19 of which were domestic positions - being made redundant in the third quarter of 2003. The bank's third quarter earnings report, released last week, said salary costs had gone up by $5.3 million, including "redundancy actions taken in the quarter to achieve further operating efficiencies".

There were also 14 staff sacked earlier in the year for allegedly distributing pornographic material by e-mail.Yesterday, Mr. Smith said the good news was that Bank of Bermuda employees could benefit from "overseas assignments with HSBC".

HSBC currently has 218,000 employees worldwide in 79 countries around the globe.