LAGOS, Aug 20 (Reuters) - Nigeria's privatisation agency on Tuesday invited expressions of interest in a 51 percent stake in commercial and agricultural truck assembly company Steyr Nigeria Ltd.
The Bureau for Public Enterprises (BPE) said in a notice that prospective investors must provide evidence of ownership and management of car or truck manufacturing operations to prequalify for any bid.
"For prequalification, interested core investors must supply evidence of their ability to own and manage Steyr," the agency said in a notice.
Steyr, located in the northeast Bauchi state, was established in 1976 as an assembly and manufacturing plant and has the capacity to produce 8,000 commercial trucks, 2,000 agricultural tractors and 500 generators a year.
The agency said prequalified applicants would have to pay a $15,000 non-refundable fee before they would be issued with bid documents and allowed access to the data room.
The deadline for the expression of interest was September 27, it said.
Steyr is one of about half a dozen vehicle assembly plants set up by the government in the 1970s as part of a plan to transform Nigeria into a car manufacturing country.
Most of the plants have either shut down or are in a deplorable state due to mismanagement and neglect during more than 15 years of army rule which ended in 1999.
The BPE hopes to raise $960 million from the sale of key state enterprises in its privatisation programme this year.
The programme suffered a major setback earlier this year with the botched sale of telecoms company Nitel -- regarded as Africa's biggest privatisation -- which the government had hoped would raise some $1.3 billion.