The banking arm of Dah Sing Financial Holdings and Carlyle Group will pay just over US$128 million for a 24.99% of Chongqing Commercial Bank. Dah Sing Financial Holdings will take a 17% stake for US$88 million while Carlyle, the world's largest private equity fund, will take a 7.99%. The price of the acquisition is 1.87 times the bank's book value last year, going by mainland accounting standards, the South China Morning Post reported. The bank has 66 branches in Chongqing, US$3.8 billion in assets and 701,000 customers. It has been restructured to help it deal with a heavy burden of bad loans and plans to list in Hong Kong in 2007. By the end of this year, Chongqing Commercial Bank was expecting US$63.9 million yuan in operating profits.