BUSINESS Secretary Lord Mandelson has called on European regulators to ensure the Vauxhall plants in Ellesmere Port and Luton are not put at risk by any “political fix.”

Last week’s decision by American car giant General Motors (GM) to sell a 55% stake in its European businesses of Opel and Vauxhall to Canadian car parts maker Magna and its Russian partner Sberbank has fuelled fears the UK could bear the brunt of an inevitable jobs cull.

Magna is believed to be targeting 10,000 redundancies from GM Europe’s 54,000-strong workforce which includes 5,500 in the UK.

Germany is providing the lion’s share of between 4.5bn and 5bn euros of state aid to Magna, and Chancellor Angela Merkel said last week that the decision to sell to Magna was the outcome her government had been working towards, as it fought to preserve the firm’s 25,000 jobs and four car plants in Germany.

Union leaders representing the 2,200 staff at Ellesmere Port and colleagues in Luton fear the UK could suffer disproportionately.

Ellesmere Port union convenor John Fetherstone said business plans unveiled to him by Magna a month ago involved 840 job losses for the plant and production at two-thirds capacity.

But Lord Mandelson said the sale will be scrutinised by the European Commission and he called on it to ensure the British Vauxhall business is dealt with fairly.

Speaking to the BBC, the Business Secretary said: “I think this is going to trigger quite a debate and quite an examination by the European Commission.

“European governments and the Commission will want to drill down into the business plans and the financial contributions by the various governments to see that European state aid rules in this Magna-GM deal are being respected.

“The Commission should not accept anything that looks like a political fix or any linkage between aid and retention of jobs in any specific plant or country.”