Noonan: State may sell stake in AIB

Finance Minister Michael Noonan said the Government may seek to sell a stake in Allied Irish Bank before the country’s next scheduled election.

The State owns 99.8% of the lender after injecting €21bn from 2009 to 2011 as the bank’s bad loans soared amid the worst property crash in Western Europe. A sale of shares would help set a value for the bank, he said.

“There’s a political timetable as well,” Mr Noonan said in an interview with Bloomberg Television at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “The Government will have an election at the latest at the end of March, early Apr 2016, so we might test the market sometime ahead of that.”