Italy looking to sell up to 40 percent of railways group - minister

ROME (Reuters) - Italy is looking to sell up to 40 percent of the national railways group, Ferrovie dello Stato, as the government seeks to make large state-owned groups more efficient and raise funds to cut its public debt. At a cabinet meeting on Monday, the government passed a decree to start the process of an initial public offering for Ferrovie , Transport Minister Graziano Delrio said. The rail network will remain in public hands, Delrio said, adding that details on the sale will be discussed further in coming weeks. Italy sold last month a minority stake in the national post office Poste Italiane , raising around 3.4 billion euros (£2.3 billion) for state coffers in the country's biggest state asset sale for a decade. Like Poste Italiane, Ferrovie dello Stato is a state-run behemoth that has been restructured several times to cut its costs and offer better services to consumers. For Prime Minister Matteo Renzi's government, the listing of Ferrovie is another step in a long-term plan to make overstaffed institutions more efficient and capable of supporting a fledgling economic recovery. Under Renzi's privatisation plan, the state is supposed to sell a minority stake in air-traffic controller Enav during the first half of next year, while Ferrovie would go public by the end of 2016, a top Treasury official, Fabrizio Pagani, said in September. Delrio did not specify whether this timetable was confirmed. (Reporting by Giuseppe Fonte, writing by Steve Scherer and Francesca Landini)