Expect many, many more stories like this:
France was embroiled in a protectionism row yesterday after the government announced that the assembly of some Renault cars would be shifted from Slovenia to the Paris area, creating 400 new jobs.
President Nicolas Sarkozy later insisted that the move would not cause any job losses in a fellow EU state, but the European Commission said it planned to launch an investigation.
M. Sarkozy infuriated eastern European members of the EU last month when he linked โฌ6bn (ยฃ5.6bn) in cheap loans to the struggling French auto industry to a guarantee that car-making jobs would remain in France. He even questioned why French car firms needed plants in eastern Europe at all. Alarm bells rang in Brussels and across eastern Europe yesterday morning when the French Industry Minister, Luc Chatel, announced that production of some Clio cars would transfer from Slovenia to a giant Renault assembly plant at Flins in the Seine valley, west of Paris.
โToday, the Renault group will announce that it will repatriate the production of a vehicle that was until now made outside France to the Flins plant, which will be extra output for that factory,โ M. Chatel said. He claimed that this was a โfirst signโ that the French aid package to car manufactur ers was working.






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