MILAN (Reuters) - Italy's Monte dei Paschi di Siena, which faces a 2.1 billion euro (1.6 billion pounds) funding shortfall after a European banking review, will not ask for additional state aid, Chief Executive Fabrizio Viola told financial daily Il Sole 24 Ore.
The lender is evaluating all options to plug the capital shortfall, even a tie-up, but it is not in talks with any potential partner, Viola said in the interview published on Monday.
"We are looking at all the options, and when I say 'all' it means 'all'," Viola told the paper when asked whether the bank would also weigh a merger with a stronger competitor.
"At the moment we are not in talks with anyone," he said.
Monte dei Paschi, Italy's third biggest lender, failed the euro zone stress tests even after tapping the market for 5 billion euros as recently as June.
The lender has given back 3 billion euros in state aid out of a total of 4.1 billion euros it received at the start of 2013.
In a separate interview with daily Corriere della Sera, Monte dei Paschi's Chairman Alessandro Profumo said the bank did not need state intervention to survive.
Profumo and Viola criticized the banking review saying the Tuscan lender, which has been restructuring its operations for only about a year, should not be judged on the same criteria applied to other lenders who have been revamping their activities for years.
Monte dei Paschi has hired UBS and Citi as advisers to assess its strategic options after the results of the health check on Sunday showed it had the biggest capital shortfall to plug.
(Reporting by Francesca Landini; editing by David Clarke)