Alitalia has postponed by about a week to December 6 a deadline for non-binding offers for Italy's ailing airline.

Its adviser, Citigroup, has a short-list of potential investors including Air France-KLM, Lufthansa and domestic carrier Air One. Russia's Aeroflot pulled out last week.

"Contacts and discussions with the subjects involved are still being pursued," it said in a statement after a board meeting on Wednesday. "Consequently it is foreseen that any possible proposals should be made by 6 December."

Alitalia also said it would identify the candidates by the deadline.

Last week, it said its board could meet in the first half of December to choose one of them for exclusive talks.

Lufthansa will decide by the end of the year whether to make a bid, its chief executive Wolfgang Mayrhuber said in a newspaper interview on Sunday.

"Alitalia has big and barely manageable problems. We are studying whether we can find a recipe (to handle these) and make a bid," he told Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

Alitalia has a market capitalization of about EUR1.2 billion euros (USD$1.78 billion) and loses a million euros per day.

Prime Minister Romano Prodi's government had to abandon its own attempts to sell the state's 49.9 percent stake in July when all bidders pulled out.

Both Air France-KLM and Lufthansa snubbed the auction because they did not like the terms.