Australia and New Zealand Banking Group is raising A$2.5 billion ($1.95 billion) in a share sale, partly to fund a possible purchase of some of Royal Bank of Scotland's Asian assets, ANZ said today.

ANZ, Australia's fourth-largest lender, said in a statement to the Australian stock exchange that it had made a non-binding bid for the assets, which RBS recently put up for sale as part of a plan to retreat back to its home markets and exit or shrink in up to 36 of the countries where it operates.

RBS’s Asian asset disposals are not thought to include its private banking operations.

HSBC Holdings and Standard Chartered have also expressed interest in buying the assets, which include operations in India, Pakistan, Indonesia and Taiwan and could fetch about $2 billion, Reuters said, quoting unnamed sources.

ANZ said it was raising fresh equity through an institutional placement of shares at A$14.40 each, a discount of 7.5 per cent to the stock's closing price of A$15.57 on Tuesday. The bank also gave its retail shareholders the chance to buy additional shares, raising up to around A$350 million.

The bank said some of the money would also be used to bolster its balance sheet, revealing that bad-debt charges were likely to be about 20 per cent higher in the second half of its fiscal year than in the first half when charges totalled A$1.44 billion.