Thirty jobs have been axed by an Oxfordshire-based American packaging company.

Crown Cork and Seal have revealed that half the threatened redundancies from its worldwide corporate technology group would come from its centre at the Grove Technology Park.

But a company spokesman said only a third of the job losses had been compulsory.

For the past two weeks, the Philadelphia-based multinational corporation had refused to confirm or deny persistent rumours that many posts would go from the Oxfordshire site - one of its two major sites for research and development technology. A company spokesman said that it had exhausted every option to minimise its job losses throughout the corporation's global bases, which together employ 450 people in research work.

She said that from a headcount of 380 potential candidates for redundancy, 63 employees had been axed - half of them from its European operations, and the other half from sites in the States.

Of the Grove job losses, she said: "Thirty people were declared redundant, only ten of which were not voluntary."

Crown Cork and Seal, whose other main research and development centre is near Chicago, stressed that selection for redundancy had been determined on assessment of individuals' skill values in terms of meeting the company's future needs. She said: "We're focusing our resources on strategic projects in which our corporate technology would best serve our company's future requirements."

The original employers, Metal Box Ltd, merged with the French firm, Carnaud, in the mid-1980s.

Crown Cork and Seal then took over the renamed Carnaud Metal Box some three years ago.

Story date: Thursday 09 December

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.