* E.ON gets 3 bln eur offer for Thuega unit - sources
* E.ON likely to accept offer next week - sources
* E.ON shares rise 2.4 percent
(Adds details)
By Peter Dinkloh
FRANKFURT, Aug 7 (Reuters) - Germany's E.ON is set to accept a 3 billion euro ($4.3 billion) offer for its Thuega unit from local utilities, people close to the matter said, a deal that would be one of the biggest M&As in Europe so far this year.
A group of about 50 local German utilities, which has been in exclusive talks with E.ON, has offered to acquire the Thuega division, two persons who declined to be identified because the sale process is confidential said on Friday.
The supervisory board of E.ON, the world's largest utility by sales, will discuss the offer for Thuega, which bundles minority stakes in about 110 municipal utilities, early next week and is set to approve the sale, the sources told Reuters.
"They'll probably decide that the division will be sold," said one of the sources with direct knowledge of the situation.
An E.ON spokesman declined to comment.
E.ON shares outperformed its European peers, rising as much as 2.9 percent on Friday. They closed up 1.8 percent at 26.76 euros while the DJ Stoxx utilities index advanced 1.7 percent.
The deal would be one of just a handful of billion-euro transactions this year in Europe as slumping earnings and difficulties in borrowing money have cut the value of transactions by more than half to 340 billion euros so far, Thomson Reuters data showed.
The value of the takeovers by companies is actually much smaller as the number includes government bailouts. Excluding these, the offer, if confirmed, the offer would be the eighth-largest so far this year.
The biggest offer, Xstrata's 43 billion euro bid for Anglo American, is about three times larger than the next, Enel's 13 billion euro payment for stakes in Endesa, when including debt.
BIG SPENDERS
The energy and power industry remains one of the biggest spenders, ranking third amongst 13 sectors, as profits have held up better than other sectors and as companies seek to raise money for takeovers by selling assets.
Thuega, based in Munich and founded 143 years ago, generated sales of 16.4 billion euros in 2008 and posted a profit from ordinary activities of 355 million euros.
The group of local utilities is the only bidder for Thuega, separate sources told Rueters previously. Any other bidder would have had to compete against rivals with insider knowledge of the target businesses.
The group consists of two consortia working together -- a consortium of the local utilities of Frankfurt, Nuremberg and Hanover, and an alliance of some 50 municipal utilities in which Thuega holds stakes, said one of the sources on Friday.
The group is not bidding for about 10 percent of Thuega, as some of the utilities in which Thuega holds stakes plan to buy shares independently, the source said.
Should E.ON agree to the sale, the bidders would seek to sell a stake in Thuega to another utility such as Denmark's Dong, the person said.
E.ON has not yet confirmed it plans to divest Thuega. It said in November only that it was considering all options, including a sale of the unit, which generates 30 percent of the gas sales of E.ON's pan-European gas unit.
Divesting the business could pave the way for German cartel regulators to approve an expansion of E.ON's other local utility holdings in Germany.
The Duesseldorf-based utility is barred from expanding at home now as courts have concluded that it dominates the domestic market together with rival RWE.
The Thuega stake has also led to a situation in which E.ON is competing with itself for customers. It offers power across Germany through an internet branch, seeking to lure customers away from local utilities. ($1=.6966 Euro) (Additional reporting by Vincent Flasseur in London; editing by Karen Foster)