Loral-Led Group Sweetens Bid for Bankrupt LTV’s Missile Unit : Defense: Its promise to protect the jobs of the division’s workers could threaten the nearly 2,000 positions at Loral’s Newport Beach plant.

Loral Corp. is sweetening its bid for the missile division of bankrupt LTV Corp. by promising to protect the jobs of LTV workers, a promise that could endanger the nearly 2,000 jobs at its own Newport Beach missile plant.

Loral and its two partners, the Carlyle Group in Washington and Northrop Corp. in Los Angeles, increased the bid from $445 million to $475 million on Tuesday in an ongoing battle to acquire Dallas-based LTV Missiles and Aircraft Products.

The Loral team is bidding against Martin Marietta Corp. in Bethesda, Md., which has offered $440 million.

The Loral team’s bid consists of $450 million in cash and $25 million in preferred stock. The cash component surpasses by $54 million the amount of cash that is in Martin Marietta’s offer.

Loral said Tuesday in a press release that the sweetened offer included several important elements that made its bid more attractive.

Among those elements was “job protection for LTV workers.” Loral, which previously said only that it would consider moving its local plant, said Tuesday that it now intended to “shift a substantial amount of its existing $350 million of missile work” in the Newport Beach Loral Aeronutronic division to LTV plants.

Should it win court approval, Loral said it would transfer the missile work to LTV plants in Camden, Ark., and Grand Prairie, Tex. A federal bankruptcy court judge in Dallas, who is overseeing the Chapter 11 proceedings for LTV Corp., is expected to review Loral’s bid Thursday.

Loral has been laying off workers at the Aeronutronic plant since the start of the year. Altogether, at least 600 employees have lost their jobs, reducing the total work force to fewer than than 2,000.

“It’s incredibly premature to conclude anything about Aeronutronic,” said Elizabeth Allen, spokeswoman for Loral in New York. “We said we won’t move the missile business out of LTV. We don’t know if (the bid) will be successful.”

Loral’s promise to maintain LTV jobs is similar to the promise it made two years ago when it announced the acquisition of the Aeronutronic division as part of its $715-million purchase of Ford Aerospace Corp.

Bernard Schwartz, Loral’s chairman, said then that the company had no plans to move out of Newport Beach. But a year later the company’s plant manager, James Woolnough, acknowledged that the company would look for another missile production site at some point.

At last month’s annual meeting, Schwartz first indicated that the missile jobs might go to the LTV plant.

The Newport Beach facility is losing its attractiveness for another reason.

Loral leased the Aeronutronic property from Ford Motor Co., but the rent on the 99-acre property is scheduled to increase from $92,000 a month to $1 million a month in 1996, and the lease expires in 1998.

“We have a need to relocate that facility in Newport Beach,” Allen said. “We have said it’s a solution to a short-term problem that everybody knew we had.”

In a separate action Tuesday, the Carlyle Group filed a lawsuit against Martin Marietta alleging that Martin interfered with an earlier bid by the Carlyle Group and Thomson-CSF for LTV’s defense operation.