Maybank to sell stake in Bank Internasional Indonesia

Maybank is seeking investors for 20% of BII stake as Indonesian regulator ordered to sell down its stake in BII to 80%.

Malayan Banking Bhd (Maybank), Malaysia's biggest lender by assets, has appointed UBS to handle the sale of a stake in its banking unit, PT Bank Internasional Indonesia (BII), its chairman said on Monday.

Maybank is required by the Indonesian capital market regulator, Bapepam-LK, to sell down its stake in BII to at least 80 percent from 97 percent currently. It has so far managed to sell 0.5 percent of its stake in the open market.

"We're not going to sell down if we're going to make a loss compared to what we thought it should be," said Tan Sri Dato' Megat Zaharuddin bin Megat Mohd Nor, Maybank's chairman.

"We believe that at the right price people will buy the future growth...We don't think we need to give a discount," he told Reuters.

Zaharuddin, who is also BII's president commissioner, said the bank will not sell BII's stake below 510 rupiah per share, the price it paid to buy the bank in 2008.

That means that Maybank could raise at least 4.8 trillion Indonesian rupiah ($528.63 million) from the stake sale, based on a Reuters calculation.

View the full story in Reuters.