Germany's Westdeutschen Immobilienbank (WestImmo) is considering divesting its poorly performing or non-performing real estate loans into a workout unit or bad bank of parent WestLB, in a bid to make the real estate lending business more attractive to sell, according to a news report in the Financial Times Deutschland.

At end-2010 state-backed lender WestLB rejected offers for Westimmo as 'unacceptable from an overall business point of view'. The board of the Landesbank subsequently asked for an extension of the deadline by which it had to sell Westimmo. The European Commission (EC) had given WestLB until mid-February to sell Westimmo as a condition for receiving state aid, but last month the European Court suspended the deadline.

Westimmo must now be sold by the end of the year as one of the conditions of a government bailout granted to parent company WestLB in 2008.