Russia auto giant GAZ to slash 14,000 jobs: Report

MOSCOW: GAZ group, Russia's second-largest carmaker, will slash 14,000 jobs by the end of the year, the social development ministry was quoted as saying on Thursday, amid plummeting sales in the global recession.

"We received information from GAZ that the manufacturer plans to sack 14,000 employees by the end of the year," a ministry spokesman was quoted by the RIA Novosti news agency as saying.

"They already cut 2,417 people," the ministry added, quoted by Interfax.

But a spokeswoman for the carmaker said she could neither confirm nor deny such massive job cuts.

In July, the company had already declared plans to cut 7,000 jobs at factories in its Volga River base of Nizhny Novgorod.

Russia's car market, hailed as the world's fastest growing before the economic crisis, has shrunk by almost half this year.

GAZ is owned by Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska and has been mooted as a possible partner of the Canadian-Russian consortium chosen by General Motors last week to buy its struggling European unit Opel.