Financial Services Minister Heizo Takenaka indicated Friday that the government will select a new management team for the nationalized Ashikaga Bank in a few weeks.
"It will be too long to wait for a month," he said. "But it will be impossible to do it in three or four days.
"We want to make it quick because it is very undesirable to have a void in the bank's management."
He later criticized the Ashikaga management under former President Yoshiaki Higano for failing to address the issue of the bank's excessively high deferred-tax assets.
The insolvent regional lender, based in Tochigi Prefecture, had deferred tax assets comprising 180 percent of core equity capital. The average at major banks is 50 percent.
Higano was replaced Monday by Koichi Makita, a former managing director who formed a provisional management team before the government sends new management to the bank.
The government nationalized Ashikaga Bank the same day after finding the bank insolvent with a negative net worth of 102.3 billion yen as of Sept. 30., driving its capital adequacy ratio down to minus 3.7 percent.
Banks operating domestically are required to have a minimum capital adequacy ratio of 4 percent.