PKO look to purchase WBK

25th June 2010

The government has said that PKO BP, Poland’s biggest bank, will attempt to purchase BZ WBK from its troubled Irish owner AIB.

In an interview published in the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, Aleksander Grad, the treasury minister, said that it would make good business for PKO, in which the government holds a 51 percent controlling stake, to buy the 70 percent stake in BZ WBK, Poland’s fifth largest bank.

AIB has to sell its Polish subsidiary to help pay back emergency funding it received from the Irish government at the height of the credit crisis.

“We concluded that it will be very good for the banking sector as well as the entire economy, if BZ WBK, the fifth-largest bank in Pol ...