BELFAST company Shorts last night expressed its regret at the abandonment of talks between Fokker and Samsung aimed at rescuing the bankrupt Dutch aircraft manufacturer.

The decision, by administrators appointed by the courts to run Fokker, came after Shorts had informed them the Belfast plant would no longer be supplying wings for Fokker aircraft.

"Administrators are therefore forced to conclude that a relaunch of Fokker on the basis of continuing production is no longer feasible," the administrators said in a statement.

The decision by Shorts opens up plant capacity for other business and will lead to job creation.

A spokesman for Shorts Mr Alec McRitchie, said negotiations between Samsung and Fokker had been going on for nine months and were showing no signs of coming to conclusion.

"We can't leave prime factory space lying idle, as we have done for the last nine months."

One thousand employees were laid off, took early retirement or redundancy, or failed to have their contracts renewed after Fokker went bankrupt in March.

At the time the contract with Fokker was the biggest held by Shorts and accounted for 17 per cent of its business.

Since March the company had been bidding for new business to replace the Fokker work Mr McRitchie said. Some of this business was now being produced on the factory floor, some was in preproduction and some was in the negotiation phase.

The production line set up for the Fokker orders would now be dismantled to allow production of the new orders. "We hope to replace the Fokker business in the new few years and absorb the capacity left by Fokker."

The company was currently seeking 160 new employees and the prospect for further recruitment in the "near to medium term" was good, Mr McRitchie said. The company hopes that, over the next few years, it might reemploy the 1,000 people laid off in March.

New orders won by Shorts include ones with Westland for work on the Apache helicopter and with British Aerospace for work on the Nimrod maritime patrol aircraft. A number of announcements is to be made over the coming weeks and further bids are in with Boeing, Airbus and other manufacturers.

Since March, Shorts had received orders for only nine wing sets from Fokker. "It is sad that a relationship that goes back 30 years has come to an end, but we felt that we had done everything we could," Mr McRitchie said.

The administrators said that negotiations with prospective candidates for the takeover of Fokker or the parts of Fokker connected with aircraft production would continue on the basis of a plan to have the wings built elsewhere.

"Such a transfer of production will entail considerable delay and price increases, not only for Fokker but also for other suppliers. The chances that the Fokker programmes could survive on the basis of such a plan must be regarded as extremely small."

Mr McRitchie said his company would be willing to help Fokker in any way that it could.