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Byers refuses to quit over Rover, slams BMW

LONDON: The British minister at the centre of a political storm over BMW AG's dumping of ailing carmaker Rover told a Sunday newspaper he had no plans to resign.

The thousands of job losses certain at Rover's Longbridge plant near Birmingham are an embarrassment to the British government which said it knew nothing about the deal before it was announced last week.

"If I had been responsible for the 1.4 billion-pound ($2.2 billion) losses incurred by BMW, I may have considered resigning but I wasn't," Trade and Industry Secretary Stephen Byers told the Sunday Business newspaper when asked if he was considering his position.

But Byers, in Birmingham on Saturday to assess the damaging blow to the city's car industry, tried to turn the political heat on BMW, attacking the company for being "highly secretive" over its British retreat.

Byers told the newspaper that at an hour-long meeting with Rover chief Werner Saemann earlier this month there was no hint of BMW's planned pullout.

"He gave no inkling that it was coming," Byers told the newspaper. "There is a feeling of real anger that they didn't involve the UK government when we felt we had a partnership with them...They have been highly secretive."

The Observer newspaper said Byers heard of the deal being hammered out between BMW and venture capital group Alchemy Partners six months ago. But it said when the minister confronted BMW, the Munich-based carmaker denied the rumours.

Byers told Sky TV that BMW had misled him about the future of Rover and the Longbridge plant in a meeting on March 10, six days before the Alchemy deal was announced.

"I opened that meeting by saying I hoped that we would be able to have a full and frank exchange of views...and six days before they made the announcement, there was not even a hint that that was in their minds," Byers said.

"Indeed, they went through their strategy to deal with the mounting losses of two million pounds a day and nowhere in that was there an indication that the break up of Rover and the disposal of Longbridge was in their thinking," he said.

"BMW, by not disclosing their strategy, by keeping the government in the dark and misleading ministers like myself, did not allow us to build a programme desperately needed by the people in Birmingham."

BRITISH MEDIA SAY BMW PULLOUT A REALITY CHECK

Byers has demanded a meeting with BMW, Alchemy and Ford Motor Co. Ford is included in the ministerial summons as it took UK utility vehicle manufacturer Land Rover off BMW's hands last week for $2.9 billion as part of the deal.

But amid the gloomy predictions in Sunday newspapers of thousands of job losses -- not only at Longbridge but also at Ford's Dagenham plant in east London -- most commentators blamed decades of mismanagement at Rover for BMW's pullout.

"BMW made mistakes, certainly...and the manner of its exit, leaving tens of thousands of jobs and a dealer network to swing in the wind with no prior warning is disgraceful," wrote economist Will Hutton in The Observer. "But this remains a home-made tragedy," he said.

The Sunday Times, which reported Ford's possible closure of Dagenham with 3,000-4,000 job losses, wrote in an editorial: "(BMW's) decision is hard on the West Midlands, but its logic is hard to fault...The simple lesson from this debacle is that Britain has an appalling post-war record of making cars, and it would be wise to accept that reality." -Reuters