The government is looking for foreign banks interested in taking over two of the country's ailing banks under a management contract, sources at the Nepal Rastra Bank said. An advertisement to that effect is likely to appear in The Economist magazine later this week. An audit by the international auditing group KPMG Barnets early this year had declared the two banks "technically insolvent," following which the central bank and the government had begun seeking ways to keep them from collapsing. By its own account, about 23 percent of the Rastriya Banijya Bank's total investment of Rs 29.91 billion is either of "poor quality" or outright bad. Nepal Bank Limited fares no better with 32 percent of the total loan of Rs 22 billion unpaid, some for decades. The banks have been plagued by poor assessment of projects, almost non-existing monitoring, insider lending (in the case of NBL) and political loans (in the case of the govern-ment- owned RBB). According to the KPMG report, the two banks together hold about 60 percent of all deposits in the country and are said to have a negative net worth of over Rs 25billion.