A departing General Motors executive is in line to become chairman of Gaz, the car company owned by Oleg Deripaska, the Russian oligarch seeking a carmaking deal with Opel.

Bo Andersson, who stepped down as GM’s global head of purchasing last week, has been invited to the job at Gaz, which plans to build cars for the bankrupt Detroit carmaker’s Opel unit if a stake sale is agreed with Canada’s Magna International and Russia’s Sberbank.