The great bank sell-off

Want to buy a biggish local bank at a knock-down price? Join the queue of foreigners bidding for former state-owned banks in central Europe - but watch out for messy loan books and murky questions of ownership. Antony Currie reports on the restructuring of the region's banking systems and profiles three of the newly foreign-owned banks.

Czechs lag behind

There is only one way to describe the banking sector in central Europe: too small. The banks in Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary are too small and too few to meet the growing demand for capital from corporate and retail customers and they are not big enough to survive without outside help if the three states join the European Union.

According to analysts in the west, there is only one effective way to deal with this problem: sell the banks to foreigners.

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