BUCHAREST (AFP).- The presidential plane used by Romania's former communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu is to go under the hammer later this month, the Artmark auction house announced on Wednesday.

"The Rombac Super One-Eleven plane, seen by Nicolae Ceausescu as a crowning achievement of Romanian industry, will have a starting price of 25,000 euros," Artmark said ahead of the May 27 sale.

Ceausescu used the plane between 1986 and December 1989, including on his last trip abroad to Iran.

That visit came shortly before the revolution which overthrew him and ended in his execution on Christmas Day 1989.

Since then the plane has been in a hangar belonging to the Romavia state aviation company, which went bankrupt in 2014 and whose assets are being sold.

The plane was made under licence from the British Aircraft Corporation under a deal worth 300 million pounds, signed in 1978 during Ceausescu's state visit to the UK, the first of its kind for a communist leader.

The dictator was feted with a ride in a gilded carriage to Buckingham Palace alongside Queen Elizabeth II and a state banquet held in his honour.

The first Rombac plane took to the skies in 1982, but only nine were built before Romania abandoned the project in 1990.

© Agence France-Presse