BERLIN, April 20 (Reuters) - Germany aims to have a "bad bank" plan ready by the summer break, a government spokesman said on Monday, playing down the prospect of a concrete set of proposals emerging from a meeting on Tuesday.
Chancellor Angela Merkel and top government officials are due to discuss on Tuesday how to free commercial banks of billions of euros of toxic assets, to boost confidence in the sector and to help them to lend more.
But they do not envisage producing a final bad bank plan.
"There will be some preliminary clarifications but you should not expect more from tomorrow's meeting," government spokesman Thomas Steg told a regular news conference.
Under a bad bank scheme, commercial banks would hive off problem loans into separate entities, which would be centrally managed with state guarantees to stop further falls in value until the crisis passes.
The government has already made clear it prefers a decentralised solution to a prospective bad bank.
Noting the parliament goes into recess over the summer, Steg said: "In this regard, we are targeting a specific date: June/July."
"In any case, we want to have clarity on this issue by the summer break, and have this subject resolved for us internally and for the public and all those involved ... so that the situation in the banking sector can stabilise," he added.
The Bundestag lower house of parliament is due to hold its last session before the summer break on July 3, with the Bundesrat upper house holding its last session a week later.
Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck said earlier this month that if all the toxic assets were put in a single bad bank it would cost taxpayers more than 200 billion euros ($260 billion), which he could not justify.
This suggests lenders saddled with troublesome assets could end up housing them in individual vehicles. Steinbrueck has also sought to differentiate between "toxic assets" and those that are only temporarily suffering from liquidity problems.