By Giuseppe Fonte

ROME Italy's Treasury said on Friday it had picked UBS , Jefferies and Clifford Chance as financial and legal advisers for the privatisation of bailed-out bank Monte dei Paschi di Siena (MPS).

Commitments agreed with European Union competition authorities at the time of MPS's 5.4-billion-euro ($5.72 billion) bailout in 2017 bind Rome to eventually selling its 64% stake in the bank.

After a failed attempt to sell the Tuscan lender to larger peer UniCredit in 2021, Italy agreed to Brussels' new privatisation terms that were never fully disclosed.

However, Economy Minister Giancarlo Giorgetti said this week MPS could return to private hands by the end of next year.

Both Giorgetti and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni have said in recent months that the government would try to boost competition among Italy's banks with the privatisation of MPS.

This raises the prospect of a potential deal with Banco BPM or BPER Banca, Italy's third and fourth largest banks respectively, although both have repeatedly said they are not interested in MPS.

Given the absence of interested buyers in the short term, a share placement is seen as the most likely option to reduce the state's stake and work towards re-privatisation commitments, sources close to the matter have told Reuters.

At current prices, the Treasury's stake is worth almost 2 billion euros, just above the 1.6 billion euros Rome injected in the bank as part of a wider 2.5 billion euro capital increase finalised in the final quarter of last year.

MPS's privatisation is a key plank of a sell-off programme totalling 20-21 billion euros over the next three years that the government announced last month to keep in check Italy's debt pile, the second-largest in the euro zone as a proportion of gross domestic product (GDP).

Under a 2020 decree, the Treasury listed among options to privatise MPS an offer to either institutional or small investors, including the bank's employees, as well as possible extraordinary operations such as a merger deal.

($1 = 0.9439 euros)

(Editing by Gavin Jones and Richard Chang)