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Britain gave DeLorean millions

By JOHN JONES

LONDON -- A parliamentary committee plans to grill Cabinet ministers about the huge sums of public funds given John Z. DeLorean for a luxury car company he allegedly tried to save with a multi-million dollar cocaine deal.

Members of Parliament Thursday demanded to know why two successive British governments backed DeLorean's fast ambitions, losing some $136 million of government funds.

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'There has been a scandalous lack of attention to the background of the people who were entrusted with taxpayers money,' Conservative MP Michael Grylls said Thursday.

'It is a devastating indictment of the incompetence by the ministers at the time.'

Parliament's most powerful committee, the Public Accounts Committee, plans to grill ministers about how DeLorean financed his dream of becoming an American car tycoon -- with the British government's money.

The committee can summon even current and former prime ministers to its sessions, which were expected to take place sometime before Christmas.

DeLorean was jailed today in Los Angeles on charges he was the alleged financier of a scheme to buy and re-sell 220 pounds of cocaine - worth $23 million.

Federal prosecutors said he allegedly conceived the plot in a desperate gamble to save his Northern Ireland car company from ruin.

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A spokesman for one of DeLorean's creditors said the defunct car firm are owed nearly $71 million. Renault, its biggest creditor, claimed it is owed $17 million for engines.

DeLorean built a luxury car plant 3,500 miles from its main market, the United States, in a region with no auto engineering tradition. But he created 2,600 jobs in one of Britain's worst unemployment spots - Northern Ireland.

'I never doubted that this was money down the drain,' said Neville Sandelson MP, Ulster spokesman for the new Social Democratic Party.

'We should have known better than to entrust such sums to such a dicey character and in an operation which lacked normal financial criteria.'

Luxury car sales slumped in the United States because of the recession. In September 1980, the Conservative government offered $23.8 million in grants, another bank guarantee came in July 1981 and further $25.5 million in January.

DeLorean came back again in February to ask for more, but Mrs. Thatcher finally slammed the brakes on and called in the receiver. Newspapers estimate DeLorean only put $390,000 of his own money into the venture.

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