By Franklin Alli, with agency reports

LAGOS — In its bid to divest its stake from Peugeot Automobile Nigeria Limited, PAN, Asset Management Corportaion, AMCON, yesterday called on the investing public to bid for its 79.3 per cent equity (ownership) stake in the company.

AMCON, in a statemnt, said it owned 79.3 per cent of PAN Limited, having acquired the stake four years ago after purchasing the company’s debt and taking some as equity.

According to the statement, “PAN Nigeria had assets totalling N24.96 billion  (about $125.43 million) as of December 2014 and equity of N11.98 billion, and was seeking investors with experience in auto mobile manufacturing to buy the stake on offer. Bids will close on January 26 at 1600 GMT.”

Peugeot Citroen is the technical partner to the Nigerian assembly plant, which has capacity to assemble 240 cars a day, PAN said on its website.

Recall that PAN Limited was set up in 1972 as a joint venture between the Nigerian government and France’s Peugeot, with an annual production of 90,000 cars by the 1980s.

However, operations nosedived and the company accumulated bad loans shortly after the government sold its stake via a privatisation to local core investors in 2006.

Recently, President Muhammadu Buhari met Peugeot’s executive vice president for Africa and the Middle-East, Jean-Christophe Quemard, to discuss the revival of local production.

The government under a National Automotive Industry Development Plan has ordered local car distributors to come up with plans for new assembly plants, along with threats of imposing prohibitive import duties.

AMCON was set up to absorb bad loans from banks after a $4 billion bailout in 2009 rescued nine lenders from collapse.

AMCON then bought bad loans at a discount in exchange for government-backed bonds and has since been selling off collaterals against those loans to pay bondholders.