Portugal unable to find buyers for nationalised bank-daily

LISBON Nov 29 (Reuters) - Portugal has been unable to find any potential buyers for Banco Portugues de Negocios (BPN), a small bank which was nationalised in November 2008, daily Diario de Noticias reported on Monday. The daily said that for the second time an attempted sale of BPN has drawn no interest as the deadline for bids approaches on Tuesday.

The government has set a base price of 180 million euros for the bank but any potential buyer is likely to have to inject 400 to 500 million euros into the bank, the paper said.

Nobody at the finance ministry was immediately available for comment.

The government nationalised small private bank BPN after an investigation following problems at the bank which had preceded the global financial crisis.

With the euro crisis hitting Portugal hard and many economists seeing it as the next country potentially needing a bailout after Ireland, Portuguese banks are suffering and are reliant on the European Central Bank for funding.

The daily said that if BPN were to go bankrupt it could cost the state around 2.5 billion euros.

(Reporting by Axel Bugge; Editing by Toby Chopra)