For sale: huge creaky bank in China. Lends money at will; consistently loss-making; in need of some repair; one careless owner. The ‘for sale’ sign hanging over the Agricultural Bank of China could justifiably read this way. It should certainly come with a stern wealth warning attached.
The forthcoming IPO of ABC, announced by the government in January, is the deal that everyone, the government included, said would never take place. A woefully managed state-directed lender for years, ABC, with about 31,000 branches and offices and some 500,000 staff, is, by all the most worrying measures, the largest bank in China.
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