PARIS (Bloomberg) — Unilever has won European Union approval to buy Sara Lee Corp.'s shower-gel and European detergents business after it agreed to sell off the Sanex deodorant and body-wash brand in the region.

The sale of the Sara Lee unit allays competition concerns over the 1.3 billion-euro ($1.76 billion) deal, the European Commission said in an e-mailed statement.

"We had to ensure that the transaction would not lead to increased prices for consumers," EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia said.

"As Unilever offered a strong and clear-cut remedy to address the competition concerns in a number of deodorant markets, the commission was able to clear the merger."

Unilever, the world's second-largest consumer-goods maker, sought to buy the competing Sara Lee lines to further focus on international brands. Combining the Sanex brand with Unilever's Dove and Rexona would "likely have led to price increases" in Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, the UK, Ireland, Spain and Portugal by removing the company's main rival, the European Commission, the 27-nation EU's antitrust agency, said.

The Sara Lee brands had sales of more than 750 million euros for the 12 months ending June 2009, according to Unilever.

EU approval allows Unilever to add important brands to the "key growth category" of home and personal care, Doug Baillie, the company's president for western Europe, said in a statement today.

Unilever's CEO Paul Polman last year broke the company's nine-year streak of avoiding major takeovers with the Sara Lee purchase, which includes more than 90 brands in 19 European countries.

Sara Lee spokesman Ernesto Duran declined to comment. The EU is also reviewing the sale of Sara Lee's insecticide unit to S.C. Johnson & Son Inc. Almunia said he expected to rule on the deal before Christmas.

Syngenta AG, the world's biggest maker of agricultural chemicals, also won EU approval yesterday to buy Monsanto Co.'s hybrid sunflower-seed business, Almunia said.

Syngenta agreed to sell Monsanto units in Spain and Hungary to settle competition concerns.