ALITALIA SpA's new buyers began talks yesterday to sell a stake in the company to Air France-KLM Group or Deutsche Lufthansa AG, giving one of the carriers a partnership with the airline that will control half of the Italian market.

CAI, the Italian investor group led by businessman Roberto Colaninno, met Air France executives yesterday in Paris and will meet with Lufthansa today. CAI is leading a rescue to merge Alitalia's flight business with Air One SpA, leaving the government to erase Alitalia's debt and other assets.

"It would be a bargain for them," said Francesco Giavazzi, an economics professor at Bocconi University in Milan and a former director general of the Italian Treasury. "They don't even have to pay Alitalia's debt."

The Italian government has been trying to sell its 49.9 percent stake in Alitalia for almost two years and both Air France and Lufthansa participated in failed auctions for the airline. They are interested in buying a minority stake in Alitalia because it has slots at Europe's busiest airports and a fleet valued at 2 billion euros (US$2.7 billion), Bloomberg News said.

Alitalia controls almost two thirds of the Rome-Milan route, the second-busiest in Europe, and has 10 pairs of slots at London's Heathrow, Europe's biggest airport. The Heathrow slots alone are worth about 300 million euros, based on Deloitte & Touche estimates. Alitalia in December sold three pairs of slots at Heathrow for 92 million euros. The Italian airline carried more than 25 million passengers last year to Europe's third-biggest tourism destination.

Alitalia's "slots at London Heathrow are the goose that lays the golden egg," said Oliviero Baccelli, deputy director of Bocconi University's Center of Regional, Transport and Tourism Economy in Milan.