Word: opel
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German Chancellor Angela Merkel's race to save automaker Opel - and the jobs of its 25,000 employees in Germany - is beginning to look like a high-speed pileup that could cost her at the polls...
...talks with Opel owners General Motors back on track, Merkel is reportedly ready to abandon her previous plan to force GM to sell a controlling stake in its European business to a consortium of Canadian-Austrian car-parts maker Magna International and Russia's Sberbank. According to the German tabloid Bild, the German government has told GM's chief negotiator, John Smith, that Berlin will consider GM's preferred investor, the Belgian industrial group RHJI, as long as it teams up with a partner from the automotive industry. (See TIME's photo-essay "GM's Eight Great Hopes...
...Number of U.S. brands. GM also owns part of 5 brands overseas, including Opel and Vauxhall...
...Number of brands GM is trying to unload. It recently agreed to sell Hummer to a Chinese firm. It has potential buyers for Saturn and Saab, but Pontiac could be junked. GM's newly consolidated European arm, Opel, is being sold to Magna/Sber bank/GAZ, a Russo-Canadian partnership...
...also questions over the robustness of Magna, which has been hit hard by the global downturn. Magna said during the negotiations it would cut 10,000 jobs across Europe, with the axe falling on around 2,500 jobs in Germany, but Magna pledged to keep the four German Opel factories open. The Opel factory in the city of Bochum could be the worst hit, with 1800 jobs under threat. "There'll be restructuring and that's inevitable because we have overcapacity in Europe," Jörg Schrott, the spokesman for Opel and GM Europe tells TIME. "The overcapacity must...