Europe's politics hold up GM's Opel sale

The Germans aren't the only ones hoping to hurdle European Union objections to General Motors Co.'s plans to sell a majority stake in its Adam Opel GmbH unit.

GM is pushing to close "open issues" in a binding deal, perhaps as early as this week, that would convey 55 percent of GM's German automaker to Magna International Inc. of Canada and Sberbank, a Russian financial player with close ties to Vladimir Putin's Kremlin and the automaker GAZ.

GM's board, which vetted proposals for Opel at meetings in late August and September, is not expected to reconsider the transactions unless emerging EU questions force a reappraisal. GM management, I'm told, is using the holdup simultaneously to reassess the logic of its complex Opel deal and to press to get it done, politics or not....More