Shareholders of the bailed-out bank Fortis have rejected the sale of the business to the French bank BNP Paribas, leaving the future of the Benelux financial firm in question.

They voted against a government rescue deal under which BNP Paribas bought most of Fortis’s Belgian banking and insurance operations. That sale was made conditional on shareholder approval after a Belgian court ruled in December that the government was wrong to agree to the deal in October without asking shareholders to vote on it first.

Shareholders also rejected the sale of Fortis’s Dutch arm to the Dutch government. The Netherlands says it does not plan to return the business, now nationalized, to Fortis.

The rejection is a blow for BNP, Forbes noted. Investors in the French bank had hoped that the deal would go some way to securing its capital position and reducing the likelihood that it would have to raise capital.

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