TORONTO - Nokia Siemens Networks says it will hang onto about 800 Canadian employees of Nortel Networks Corp. as part of the plan to buy a major portion of the former technology giant's wireless business.

Simon Beresford-Wylie, chief executive officer of Nokia Siemens, said Monday in a conference call that about 2,500 Nortel employees would transfer to Nokia Siemens, with about a third of them in Canada.

About 500 of those jobs are expected to stay in Ottawa, where the company houses most of its Canadian operations. Most of the other jobs will be at Nortel's U.S. headquarters in Dallas.

"We have an interest in maintaining, or even growing, our presence in Canada," Beresford-Wylie said.

"In fact, we see Ottawa as a key centre of excellence in the development of next-generation wireless technologies."

The decision comes as Nortel Networks had its shares suspended by the Toronto Stock Exchange earlier in the morning.

The TSX says it took the move as a result of Nortel's plan to sell its CDMA wireless network business to Nokia Siemens for US$650 million.

Nortel chief executive Mike Zafirovski has said Nortel is in advanced talks to sell other parts of the business within a matter of weeks or months and that it would ask to have its shares delisted from public stock markets.

Normally, it takes about five business days after an application is received before a company's stock is officially delisted from the TSX, said TMX Group spokeswoman Carolyn Quick.

The 127-year-old company, which has been operating under court protection from creditors since January, had a stock-market value of just $93 million on Friday when its shares closed at 18.5 cents.

At Nortel's peak, it employed more than 90,000 people worldwide and its shares were worth the equivalent of $1,245 in July 2000, or $124.50 before a 10-for-one stock consolidation.

When the company sought bankruptcy protection, it had fewer than 30,000 employees including several thousand working for it at subcontractors.

Now that a key piece of the business is being sold, the other parts of Nortel should be shuffled to prospective buyers within weeks, or even days, suggested Carmi Levy, a telecom analyst at AR Communications Inc.

"I would describe the situation as very chaotic, fluid and fast-moving," he said.

"Whoever those potential buyers are, I'm sure they've been engaged in various levels of due diligence for months now, including actual discussions with Nortel leadership."

Nokia Siemens said it had been in talks with Nortel since January when the company filed for CCAA and bankruptcy protection.

The Wall Street Journal reported in March that Nortel had held talks with potential buyers for its enterprise division, which sells communications gear to corporations and other large-scale institutional users.

Avaya Inc. has been considered a potential purchaser of the enterprise unit.

The company also has a major division that sells wireline equipment to communications carriers.

Nortel has also been the centre of a dispute involving former employee's severance payments. Currently, the former employees will be treated as creditors and the amount of severance the get depends on how the restructuring unfolds.

Pensions are another issue facing Nortel's current and former employees. There are insufficient assets in the pension plans currently to pay 100 per cent of the benefits obligations if the plans are wound up at this time, creating a risk for all plan members whether they are still with the company or not.

Nokia Siemens executives said that it's not assuming Nortel's responsibility as part of the transaction.

"We're not expecting to bring any other liabilities from a benefits perspective," said Michael Matthews, head of strategy and business development for Nokia Siemens.

"Those liabilities stay with the estate and will be presumably settled by Nortel with the remaining creditors."

He said Nortel employees will be recognized for their previous years of service under their new employer and receive benefits.

Nortel spokesman Mohammed Nakhooda declined to comment.

"I'm not going to speculate on what may or may not happen as this is now entering a stocking horse agreement," he said in a phone interview.

"We will be going through a court-supervised agreement and it will be premature for me to comment on what may or may not happen with the specifics around the deal."

Last week, former employees of Nortel descended on Ottawa to ask MPs for help after the company stopped making severance payments after it sought creditor protection in January.

At the heart of the dispute is $45 million in bonus payments taken by Nortel executives while fired workers didn't receive any sort of severance cushion.

Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski appeared before a Parliament Hill committee on Thursday to defend the bonus payments, which he said were given to key executives in order to retain their services while the company sold off its non-core assets in an effort to stay in business.

He said the federal government turned down Nortel when it asked for help to stave off bankruptcy. Zafirovski said meetings with Industry Minister Tony Clement and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty went nowhere but he refused to say how much financial help Nortel wanted from the federal government.