General Motors has denied a weekend newspaper report Opel was preparing for insolvency.

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“This scenario is currently not on the agenda,” a spokesman for the automaker’s European unit told Reuters on Sunday.


Die Welt had said, in an unsourced report on Saturday, that GM and Opel seemed to be preparing for insolvency, having hired three law firms with renowned insolvency experts.


The paper said GM Europe would be advised by Baker & McKenzie as well as Clifford Chance, while Opel management had hired Heidelberg-based firm Wellensiek, according to Reuters.


But the GME spokesman said the company had retained the firms to assess the effect of potential restructuring measures.

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Parent General Motors in the US late last year hired bankruptcy lawyers and restructuring specialists ahead of congressional hearings into the auto industry but its board decided a ‘Chapter 11’ filing was not a viable option.


Separately, according to Reuters, German magazine Focus cited unnamed members of the German cabinet in an online report as saying Opel never paid tax in Germany because it transferred profit to its US parent.


“It cannot be that the German taxpayer has to save a company that transfers its profits to the United States,” Michael Fuchs of the Christian Democrats (CDU) political party told Bild am Sonntag.


GME’s spokesman did not comment to the news agency on the reports but said the company had invested several billion euros since 2002 in the expansion of Opel’s four German sites, a great deal of which went into the Ruesselsheim plant, near Frankfurt, where Opel is based.