Japan Airlines moved a step closer to its ultimate goal of completing its government-backed restructuring Friday. The carrier said that it gained approval from the Tokyo Stock Exchange to relist its shares, now worth more than $8 billion, on Sept 19.

In what would be the world's second-biggest IPO this year after Facebook, JAL set an indicative price of 3790 yen a share, which brings the share offering value to Y663.3 ($8.1bn) billion and the company's market capitalisation to Y687.3bn.

The indicative figure means that JAL will be larger than its biggest local rival, All Nippon Airways, which had a market value of Y619bn yesterday.

What's more important for JAL's management, the government-backed turnaround fund Enterprise Turnaround Initiative, which will sell its entire holdings of 175 million JAL shares, or 96.5 per cent of the total shares through the offering plan, will be able to garner capital gains close to the Y350bn that it injected into JAL when the company collapsed to become Japan's biggest bankruptcy by a non-financial company in 2010 with $US30bn ($28.68bn) in debt.

The approval, less than three years after becoming an unlisted company, marks one of the fastest returns to the Tokyo market by a major Japanese company after the airline's share price finished ask-only at Y1 on the last trading the day before the delisting on February 20, 2010 in the Tokyo stockmarket.