Mr Claude Bebear, chairman of insurer Axa, has resigned from the board of Societe Generale, the French bank said yesterday.

Mr Bebear was appointed to SG's board in February, after approving the planned merger of SG with Paribas, in which Axa was the biggest shareholder.

He switched sides a month later, when Banque Nationale de Paris mounted hostile bids for SG and Paribas. Throughout the sixmonth battle that followed, Mr Bebear was a lone dissenting voice at board meetings of SG and Paribas, whose other directors unanimously opposed BNP.

SG said Mr Bebear had stepped down on Saturday, hours after regulators ruled that BNP could not accept the 37 per cent of SG's shares tendered to its bid.

The position of Axa, which was already BNP's biggest shareholder, was reinforced last week when BNP issued 11.5 billion of new shares to pay for 65 per cent of Paribas. Axa brought all its Paribas shares to BNP's offer.

SG shareholders who had accepted BNP's bid will be given the shares back today. The shares had in effect been frozen since August 6th, when BNP's offer closed. Even after the offer's results were published on August 14th, the shares could not be returned to investors while the regulator debated whether to allow BNP to proceed with its offer.

Mr Jean-Claude Trichet, the central bank governor who heads the CECEI regulatory body, has spent two weeks seeking a compromise between SG and BNP.

The CECEI finally ruled last Saturday that BNP could not keep the shares, because it had failed to secure a majority of SG's voting rights. Earlier this summer, the CECEI had warned that if BNP failed to achieve majority control in its target, a merger would only be allowed if it was "concerted".

CGU, the UK's largest composite insurer, and BSCH, Spain's leading bank, are among SG's biggest shareholders. One of SG's main arguments in its defence against BNP was that a merger of the two would delay SG's pan-European plans.