LONDON - The search for a private buyer for Northern Rock could go on for several more weeks, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said on Wednesday, but he left open the option the stricken lender could be nationalised.
"In the next few weeks we are looking at the situation of how we can find buyers for Northern Rock and I think everyone (in parliament) would say that we should rule out no option in doing so," Brown told parliament.
Shares in Northern Rock crashed over 20 percent to a record low earlier on Wednesday as expectations mounted that the bank will be brought under state control.
Brown fuelled that speculation on Tuesday by going into more detail than he has done previously about what would happen if the bank was nationalised.
"Because stability is the issue, we will look at every option and that includes taking the company into public ownership and then moving it later back into the private sector," he said in an interview with ITV news.
Northern Rock has borrowed about 26 billion pounds from the Bank of England after being hit by the global credit crunch, when it became the first British bank in more than a century to suffer a run of customers withdrawing their deposits.
Political commentators say Brown is reluctant to countenance nationalisation, partly because of its associations with the more left-wing Labour governments of the 1970s when Britain was in steep economic decline.
The Labour Party lags the Conservatives in the opinion polls, hit by a series of government blunders, the Northern Rock crisis and the worsening economic outlook.
NEED FOR STABILITY
