GM CEO starts Opel charm tour at HQ

By Christiaan Hetzner

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - General Motors CEO Fritz Henderson began his bid to win Germany over to his decision to keep the Opel unit, with government cash for its restructuring, while some said it wasn't budgeting nearly enough for the job.

Berlin, which had brokered a deal for Canada's Magna (MGa.TO) to buy the unit and save as many German jobs as possible, has assured the European Commission that it would offer aid to Opel whoever owned it, but Germany's liberal Economics Minister, Rainer Bruederle, cooled such expectations.

He said on Sunday that GM did not currently satisfy the criteria for aid and repeated that position on Monday.

GM GM.UL has said it needs about 3 billion euros (2.7 billion pounds) to restructure Opel, which it trumpeted as "significantly lower than all bids submitted" in the Opel sale process, including Magna's request for 4.5 billion euros in state aid.

Credit rating agency Moody's, however, pinned the total funding requirement for Opel at $8.5 billion (5 billion pounds), nearly twice GM's publicly stated figure.

"The question remains, how will GM fund Opel? We do not think that the company's liquidity position -- including the resources available from the U.S. Treasury -- are sufficient," it wrote on Monday.

GM's abrupt U-turn on Opel, which torpedoed months of negotiations, infuriated German political leaders and Opel staff, who had lobbied heavily for greater self-determination in the face of GM's bankruptcy and $50 billion taxpayer bailout this year.

Emotions are running high among the 25,000 workers in Germany, who had hoped Magna would breathe new life into Opel, and had agreed to cost savings as part of the abortive deal.