Fiat CEO sees Agnellis always in cars - report

MILAN (Reuters) - Italy's Fiat prefers alliances over mergers, and if it were to spin off its car business, the founding family would still keep control of it, the industrial group's chief executive said in a newspaper interview.

The success that Sergio Marchionne has had in turning Fiat around since he joined the group in 2004 has raised market expectations of an eventual sale or spin-off of its car business, Fiat Auto.

Marchionne has been asked repeatedly about this possibility because the business has been seen as a drag on the other parts of the group even though it has started to make money.

He has said he would consider doing something if it was a permanent loss of value to the group.

"If in fact we do have the structural problem of value leakage, of substantial value leakage, then we need to look at this and we need to act on it," he told the Financial Times in an interview published on Friday.

But Marchionne said the Agnelli family that founded Fiat more than 100 years ago would always remain in charge.

"The only thing you have to do is to create two separate economic realities," he said. "They could be owned by the same sort of shareholders but they would own two different sets of paper."

Marchionne said the unravelling of previous acquisitions in the car industry was proof that a looser kind of alliance between manufacturers made more sense.

"I'm very much interested in size as long as the size is a consequence of market share gains from an industrial base," said Marchionne.