41 of them were forced into a merger and taken over by the state, which sought to float the new national savings bank on the stock market.

But the whole plan went to hell because the new bank was bleeding depositors, and eventually the state sold off all the branches to rival banks and took over the bad debts itself.

The bank was bleeding deposits in part because of the terms of the merger, and the fact that the other banks were actively undercutting it to gain its depositors.

But I just glanced through the article so I guess I could have misunderstood something. The link is a horribly bad pdf file. 4,5 mb to present 52 pages of black and white text. It brought my computer virtually to a standstill when I opened it.