Support in question
October 28, 2009
A member of the trust overseeing the sale of General Motors' struggling European subsidiary Opel has said Berlin will review its offer of billions of euros in state aid to help Magna restructure the Germany-based brand.
"The new government will take another look at decisions made up to now on Opel and imminent conditions to be set by the European Commission," trust member Dirk Pfeil told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper.
"The result could be a solution where Opel stays completely within the General Motors group," added Pfeil, who is a member of the Free Democrats - the party that has joined forces with Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats to form Germany's new coalition government.
Pfeil has repeatedly voiced objections to the sale of General Motors' European unit to Magna and abstained from backing it when the trust voted on the deal last month.
He argued that supporting Opel's survival with GM as its owner would only require Berlin to provide between 2.5 billion euros and 3 billion euros ($3.7 billion and $4.4 billion) of taxpayer-funded aid - much less than the 4.5 billion euros Magna had negotiated for its takeover bid.
Further delays
General Motors' board of directors is due to meet on November 3 to reconsider the deal after regulators in Brussels expressed concerns about the fairness of the German government's involvement in the bidding process.
The European Commission has been watching the deal closely to ensure state aid is not misused for political purposes. Magna had won approval from Berlin -- Germany is home to around half of Opel's 50,000 workers -- by proposing to keep all four Opel plants in Germany open. European antitrust officials question whether the deal to keep German factories open came at the expense of workers in other EU nations. An antitrust ruling is expected by November 27.
Meanwhile, the EURODA Opel dealers' association has said it hopes the sale of Opel to Magna will be completed as soon as possible.
"Waiting much longer might hurt confidence in the future we so eagerly want to focus on," EURODA Chairman Jaap Timmer wrote to GM Chief Executive Fritz Henderson in a letter obtained by the dpa-AFX financial news agency.
sje/Reuters/AFP/dpa
Editor: Sean Sinico