DUESSELDORF (Reuters) – IG Metall, Germany’s most powerful union, expects talks to drag on over how to properly fund Thyssenkrupp’s steel division once it is separated, one of its regional heads said, less than two weeks after the unit’s leadership resigned.
“Not this year,” Knut Giesler, who heads IG Metall’s branch in North Rhine-Westphalia, where Thyssenkrupp is based, told journalists when asked when critical questions around funding would be clarified.
Thyssenkrupp Steel Europe (TKSE) and its parent are around 1.3 billion euros apart on the question over how much money the division needs to continue on a stand-alaone basis, a dispute that caused both the unit’s CEO and chairman to resign at the end of August.
“We need a sustainable concept that rules out redundancies and the closure of sites. That is the clear point,” Giesler, who is supposed to join TKSE’s supervisory board and become its deputy chairman, said.
The prospect of prolonged talks comes as Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky is in talks to raise his stake in TKSE to 50%, up from 20%, a deal he can in theory still walk away from.
(Reporting by Tom Kaeckenhoff, writing by Christoph Steitz, editing by Rachel More)
