Berlin: General Motors' European unit
Opel/Vauxhall would have gone under this year without the
German government, Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Friday -- and
now she wants her money back.
"Without our involvement there would be no Opel today,"
Merkel told the Frankfurter Allgemeine (FAZ) daily in an
interview to be published tomorrow.
"We secured Opel's chances of survival."
With US parent company GM struggling to survive, Germany
gave Opel a "bridging loan" of 1.5 billion euros (USD 2.2
billion) to keep it running and Opel's 25,000 German
employees, half the European total, in a job.
In September, GM signed a preliminary deal to sell a
majority stake in Opel, a deal backed by the German government
with three billion euros in state loan guarantees, but last
month GM decided not to sell after all.
With Merkel having invested considerable political capital
in securing the deal, Berlin was not amused. It is now
demanding that GM pay back the money.
"Now that the final decision has been taken, GM now has to
pay back the bridging loan ... It has now taken over the
responsibility of financing Opel itself," Merkel told the FAZ.
GM Europe issued a statement a short time later saying it
had repaid another 200 million euros on the loan, and that the
outstanding sum of 400 million would be settled by November
30.
Bureau Report
First Published: Saturday, November 14, 2009, 00:03