By David Lawder
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - General Electric Co said on Tuesday it will move 500 U.S. power turbine manufacturing jobs to Europe and China because it can no longer access U.S. Export-Import Bank financing after Congress allowed the agency's charter to lapse in June.
The largest U.S. industrial conglomerate said France's COFACE export agency has agreed to support some of GE's global power project bids with a new line of credit in exchange for moving production of heavy-duty gas turbines to Belfort, France, along with 400 jobs.
U.S. facilities in Greenville, South Carolina; Schenectady, New York; and Bangor, Maine, will lose out on those jobs if GE wins the power bids, a GE spokeswoman said.
GE also said 100 additional jobs involved in packaging aeroderivative gas turbines will move next year from outside of Houston to Hungary and China. No U.S. facility will close, a GE spokeswoman said.
The company is bidding on $11 billion worth of international power projects that require export credit agency financing, including some in Indonesia.
It will soon announce agreements with other foreign export credit agencies to finance GE products, GE Vice Chairman John Rice said.
"If the EXIM bank were open, it would be business as usual," GE Rice said in a telephone interview.
"If you're an export credit agency outside the U.S., you are now in the process of rolling out the red carpet to U.S. manufacturers," Rice said. "There are many other companies other than us that are impacted by this."
Aerospace giant Boeing Co has also said it was considering moving work overseas due to uncertainty over the future of the EXIM bank.
Given the bitter fight in Congress over EXIM's future, Rice said GE cannot afford to wait and must make other long-term financing arrangements for large industrial projects.
"If EXIM isn't going to happen, or it's going to be a regular fight to be reauthorized, we've got to make other plans," he said.
Conservative Republicans in Congress who say that EXIM represents "corporate welfare" and "crony capitalism" successfully blocked renewal of the 81-year-old export credit agency's charter at the end of June.
EXIM supporters have thus far been unsuccessful in attaching renewal to other legislation, but new efforts are expected this autumn as Congress considers government "must-pass" agency funding, a transportation bill and an increase in the federal debt limit.
GE last year vowed to add 1,000 jobs in France to gain the blessing of the French government for the U.S. conglomerate's acquisition of the power business of France's Alstom. GE won European regulatory approval for the deal last week, and expects it to close by the end of the year.
A GE spokeswoman said the 400 jobs that could be created in France from the deal with COFACE would come in addition to the jobs agreed on through the Alstom negotiations.
(Additional reporting by Lewis Krauskopf in New York; Editing by Eric Walsh and Nick Zieminski)
