Swedish debt officials said Wednesday they were reviewing General Motors' sale of its Saab unit in order to make a recommendation to the Swedish government on a state loan guarantee to finance the deal.

They said they expected to recommend giving the guarantee for the loan to Saab, a loss-making Swedish auto maker, unless changes had been made to the accord.

But a press report suggested earlier that this final review could jeopardise the state's guarantee of the loan, which would be issued by the European Investment Bank (EIB).

"At the moment, we're in a review, a light review, of the deal done between GM and Saab. It's the ordinary course of business, we have to look into the documents and feel comfortable and just execute basically," the Swedish debt office's deputy head, Erik Sjulander, told AFP in response to the report.

The national debt office had previously recommended the guarantee.

But the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet said the debt office review of Spyker's final agreement with GM could jeopardise the whole transaction.

"The national debt office was given the assignment by the government to review the last details of the Saab deal. The national debt office's director is clear (that) that can mean the guarantee for the vital EIB loan is threatened, therefore the whole deal," the newspaper reported, publishing an interview with the office's general director Bo Lundgren.

Lundgren is quoted as saying "we will not guarantee a deal that can't be carried out."

Officials at the national debt office, however, downplayed the report when contacted.

A week ago "we told the government, which decides whether this company should have a guarantee or not, that it was ok to give a guarantee if they had the securities ... etc," spokeswoman Marja Laang told AFP.

"With the information we had a week ago, (the guarantee) was okay. Since then, (General Motors and Spyker) have made a final agreement and we have to check that they haven't changed anything," she said.

General Motors late last month agreed to sell its Saab brand to Dutch luxury sports car manufacturer Spyker as part of a restructuring of its business to cope with the impact of the global slump on the industry.