The failure by BMW to sell its Rover subsidiary to British venture capitalist firm, Alchemy, will cost chairman Joachim Milberg his job, the Financial Times Deutschland reported on Tuesday, quoting top management sources.
A spokesman for the car maker dismissed the report as "total nonsense".
Meanwhile, BMW was due to reopen talks over selling Rover Group to the Phoenix consortium on Tuesday.
FT Deutschland said that the search to find a replacement for Milberg, who has only been in office since February 1999, was already underway.
Milberg, whose contract should have run for another three years, was involved in finding his successor, along with supervisory board chairman Volker Doppelfeld and the Quandt family, which owns around 47 percent in the prestigious German car maker, FT Deutschland added.
The Financial Times reported from London that BMW had denied the report and reiterated the board's support for Milberg.
Finance chief Helmut Panke has ambitions to be in the driving seat, the newspaper said, but it quoted company sources as saying that an outsider would take the steering wheel once the long-running saga over Rover had finally come to end.
London-based Alchemy Partners announced unexpectedly that it was pulling out of talks to buy Rover, just a day after the German group had snubbed a rival offer from Phoenix, a consortium headed by former Rover chief executive John Towers.
BMW was scheduled to start negotiations with Phoenix later on Tuesday -- FRANKFURT (AFP).
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