Opel deal shall facilitate Russian auto industry

Russian bank Sberbank's acquisition of shares in Opel should help boost the development of Russia's automobile industry, said Prime Minister Vladimir Putin here on Monday.

"The Russian government has its own action to advance the auto industry, and the accord we are talking about should be accounting into it," said Putin at a affair with Sberbank's administrator German Gref, Russian Industry and Trade Abbot Viktor Khristenko, and CEO of Canada's Magna International Siegfried Wolf.

Magna, the Canadian auto genitalia maker, has accomplished accord to booty over General Motor's Opel assemblage in affiliation with Sberbank aboriginal Saturday. General Motor has filed for defalcation aegis in the United States on Monday.

Putin fatigued "the Russian government was not anon complex (in the transaction)," but rather "welcome Sberbank's involvement," the Interfax account bureau reported. Russia has been deepening cooperation with Europe in contempo years, said Putin.

"The difficult times of bread-and-butter crisis still actualize the altitude for diversifying our cooperation with arch European countries," said the prime minister.

Putin additionally hoped that Magna, which was broadly accustomed in Russia, would aggrandize its business in the country.

The Canadian aggregation has over 70,000 advisers in 326 plants in25 countries and food apparatus and systems to abounding of the world's arch auto makers.

"The capital affair is that the plan to appear from crisis proposed by such an accurate aggregation as Magna was advised to be the best both for investors and, aloft all, for the bodies who assignment atOpel plants in Germany and added countries," Putin said.

Russian car bazaar has been accretion fast afore the bread-and-butter crisis hit in backward 2008.