June 25 (Bloomberg) -- Ashikaga Holdings Co., owner of the failed regional lender acquired by investors led by Nomura Holdings Inc. last year, plans to sell shares in an initial public offering in the second half of 2010.

“We are strengthening our compliance and governance systems for a listing, under Nomura’s guidance,” Ashikaga President Satoshi Fujisawa said yesterday in an interview.

Nomura, Japan’s biggest brokerage, and other investors bought the nationalized Ashikaga Bank Ltd. from the government last July for about 280 billion yen ($2.9 billion.) Nomura owns about 50 percent of Ashikaga Holdings, according to bank disclosures.

Nomura aims to return Ashikaga to profit this year and list the lender on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2010. The bank, based in Tochigi prefecture north of Tokyo, posted a deficit of 6.6 billion yen in the year ended March 31 after recording a 30 billion yen loss on stock investments. The company forecasts a profit of 16.5 billion yen for the current fiscal year.

The Japanese government nationalized Ashikaga Bank in November 2003 after its debts exceeded assets by 102.3 billion yen and the capital adequacy ratio, a key measure of financial strength, fell to minus 3.7 percent. The government injected 260.3 billion yen into Ashikaga Bank before selling it.

Bad-loan charges at the bank rose 44 percent to 20.8 billion yen in the year just ended. The bank boosted lending by 5.5 percent to 3.4 trillion yen during the same period.

Fujisawa is a former managing director of Shoko Chukin Bank, a government-owned lender to small companies, and became Ashikaga’s president last July.

To contact the reporters on this story: Finbarr Flynn in Tokyo at fflynn3@bloomberg.net; Shingo Kawamoto in Tokyo at skawamoto@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: June 24, 2009 11:00 EDT