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Norway’s largest oil company, Statoil ASA, is reported to have hired ABG Sundal Collier Holding ASA, Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp. to manage the initial public offering (IPO) of shares in its fuel and retail unit, Bloomberg reports.

Statoil confirmed earlier this month that it plans to sell a stake in Statoil Retail & Fuel ASA during the fourth quarter of this year. The unit also includes Statoil's marine fuels, lubricants and aviation divisions.

“The plan is to list in the fourth quarter, and there are no changes to that,” Chief Executive Officer Helge Lund said at an oil industry conference in Oslo on September 2nd.

“It’s not a rush sale, so we’ll do this if we believe we can get the value that we see as reasonable,” Lund added.

Statoil submitted an application for the IPO to the Oslo stock exchange at the beginning of this month. The exchange will process the oil firm's application at its board meeting on September 29th. If approved, Statoil would have 45 days to carry out the listing, according to the rules of the exchange.

The company's plan to push ahead with the sale of its fuel and retail assets comes at a time when the industry trend has been to focus on more lucrative upsteam operations.

Statoil is looking to join a list of other companies to have sold large chunks of their fuel and retail operations in order to focus on finding and producing gas and oil, including oil majors Shell, BP and ExxonMobil.

According to market sources the Statoil sale could raise as much as US$1 billion.