A BRITISH bid for part of the stricken MG Rover Group was expected to be made today.

Business troubleshooter David James indicated that the bid by his consortium would be worth about £15m, and would be for the sports car division only, in the hope of maintaining a niche manufacturer on the Longbridge site, in the West Midlands.

The consortium had contacted the Department of Trade and Industry to ask whether it was able to give any assistance to the bid, said Mr James.

According to Mr James, Trade and Industry Secretary Alan Johnson ruled out the Government backing the bid financially, but had indicated that it may be able to offer support once the company had been acquired.

Mr James declined to name his backers, but said he expected them to sign up to the deal imminently, allowing him to make a formal bid to administrators PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Mr James did not put a precise figure on the value of the bid, but indicated that it would be about £15m.

Two bids for the MG Rover Group are understood to have been made already by Chinese motor manufacturers SAIC and Nanjing, the latter believed to be worth about £50m.

Mr James was previously brought in by the Government to salvage the Millennium Dome.

Mr James had indicated his consortium might bid about £40m for the entire MG Rover Group, with the aim of continuing with the MG operation and selling as much of the rest of the company as possible.

But this week he made clear that this option had been abandoned in what he described as "the last bid stage".

He said the administrators had been left with three options: either they could sell the whole business to one of the Chinese companies; break it up into its component parts and sell them separately; or face the "ghastly" prospect of a fire-sale by auction which could raise as little as £10m.

He cast doubt on the quality of the Chinese bids, saying that Nanjing were likely to have the Chinese Communist Party as a major backer and that SAIC said it had as little as £21m available to it as recently as two weeks ago.

He raised the prospect that the SAIC proposal could involve buying the MG Rover operation over two or three years, giving them time to ship the operating assets to China, leaving only a "hollowed-out" shell in the West Midlands.