Japan's No 3 lender eyes investment in Goldman

Tokyo: Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group (SMFG) Japan's No 3 bank, plans to invest in Goldman Sachs Group, Japanese media said, in what would be the third big Japanese investment this week on Wall Street.

SMFG said the bank had no deal in place at the moment but media said it wanted to join the list of Japanese financial firms using the upheaval in the US to aggressively expand abroad.

The purchases, including a big stake in Morgan Stanley and the Asian and Eur-opean assets of failed Lehman Brothers, are a major turnaround for Jap-anese banks that were nearly crushed by bad loans just a few years ago and needed massive injections of public cash to stay afloat.

Late on Tuesday, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway agreed to invest $5 billion in Goldman Sachs, a big boost for the Wall Street bank from the world's best-known investor, but a Goldman spokesman said he could not confirm the report SMFG would follow suit.

SMFG's investment in Goldman Sachs would total several hundred billion yen, Kyodo news agency said, while the Nikkei business daily said the bank would consider investing up to 100 billion yen ($946 million).

SMFG played down the reports, which both cited unnamed sources.

"At this point, it is not true that we've decided to invest in Goldman Sachs," said SMFG spokeswoman Chika Togawa, who declined to comment further.

In a broader rally of fin-ancial stocks, shares of SMFG finished up 1.2 per cent at 684,000 yen.