July 29 (Bloomberg) -- TPG Inc., the private equity firm founded by David Bonderman, dropped a plan to bid for Anheuser- Busch InBev NV’s breweries in eastern Europe, leaving CVC Capital Partners Ltd. as the frontrunner, three people familiar with the talks said.

CVC, a London-based leveraged buyout firm, offered about 1.5 billion euros ($2.1 billion) for the assets, which also include the Czech Republic’s Staropramen lager, one of the people said. TPG dropped its plan to bid after struggling to arrange debt financing, one of the people said. KKR & Co., the LBO firm run by Henry Kravis and George Roberts, dropped its plan to bid earlier this month for the same reason.

AB InBev, the world’s largest brewer, had sought about $2.6 billion, eight times the unit’s earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization, the people said. The brewer put the unit on sale to cut the $45 billion of debt it amassed buying Anheuser-Busch Cos in 2008. A sale would bring the total Inbev has raised from asset sales to more than $5.4 billion.

“If you’ve only got one bidder, it’s hard to secure a top price,” Trevor Stirling, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein in London, said in an interview. “I don’t think AB InBev will sell on the cheap because price is now equally as important as paying down debt.”

Marianne Amssoms, a spokeswoman for AB InBev in the brewer’s home town of Leuven, Belgium, declined to comment, as did officials at CVC and TPG, which is base in Fort Worth, Texas. The assets for sale also include breweries in Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro.

No ‘Fire Sale’

CVC, which is investing about 16 billion euros of private equity funds, plans to finance more than half of its offer with equity, cutting its requirement to raise debt, the people said. The firm is seeking to raise about 700 million euros in five and six-year senior loans, which may pay about 5 percentage points over the benchmark lending rate, two people familiar with the talks said.

AB InBev had singled out five or six units for potential sale to raise $7 billion. Chief Financial Officer Felipe Dutra in March said the brewer would not consider a “fire sale” to shed them quickly. The company has sold units from Korea to the U.S. to help repay part of a $7 billion bridge loan that matures in November.

The brewer agreed to sell a 19.9 percent stake in Chinese brewer Tsing Tao Brewery Co. Ltd. to Japan’s Asahi Breweries Ltd. for $667 million in January, and in May sold its remaining 7 percent stake to Chinese billionaire Chen Fashu for $235 million. The same month, Inbev sold its South Korea-based Oriental Brewery Co. to KKR for $1.8 billion, or about eight times Ebitda.

To contact the reporters on this story: Anne-Sylvaine Chassany in Paris at achassany@bloomberg.net; Andrew Cleary in London at acleary7@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: July 29, 2009 13:24 EDT