David Adam, the boss of the new company in Hoče, told the press the first six painted Jaguar bodywork had already left the paint shop for Magna's Austrian facility in Graz.

Adam could not say how much it cost the company to have to postpone the launch of trial production in Hoče due to problems with the environmental permit.

He did say, however, that workers at the Graz facility had to do overtime to cope with orders.

While the painting of the first 24 bodywork began in Hoče today, production is to be stepped up over the coming weeks to paint 100 pieces a day.

Once this figure is achieved, full production will be introduced, Adam explained.

"We've really worked hard over the past three years to arrive at this day so that we can now finally focus on production."

As for Magna's plans to expand production in Slovenia to manufacture the entire car with several thousand jobs, Adam said this would depend on orders.

He is confident that despite a slowdown in the global car market, they will have enough orders.

The Hoče facility, a EUR 160m investment for which the Slovenian government chipped in an incentive of almost EUR 19m, has slightly over 200 employees.

Eight of them are Slovenian workers from the Graz facility, two are Austrians, and the rest come from the Maribor area.

The workers, too, seem to be happy that the uncertainty about the environmental permit has been resolved, and believe this is "the beginning of a big story."

But this is not necessarily the end of the environmental permit saga.

While the NGO Rovo renounced its plan to challenge it at the Administrative Court just recently, it filed a lawsuit some time ago, asking the court to annul the environmental permit which was the basis for Magna to obtain a building permit.

The court will first have to establish whether Rovo is entitled to filing such a lawsuit given that it was not a party to the procedure.