DUBLIN (AP) – Administrators for bankrupt china and glassware maker Waterford Wedgwood PLC announced Friday that an American private equity firm has reached a deal to buy the company, but most details remained murky.

The Deloitte accountants handling the sale in Britain and Ireland respectively, Angus Martin and David Carson, both declined to reveal key terms of the salvage plan by KPS Capital Partners, a corporate buyout specialist – most obviously the purchase price.

In a prepared statement the bankruptcy officials suggested that KPS intends to take over the whole company within the next month – but only if they can buy the company’s non-European operations at the same time, which remains uncertain.

New York-based KPS did not return several calls seeking comment.

Waterford Wedgwood sought bankruptcy protection two months ago after its latest stock flotation fizzled and banks refused to advance more loans amid crippling debts and the global credit crunch.

Virtually the entire board of Waterford Wedgwood, including majority shareholders Tony O’Reilly and Peter Goulandris, resigned – after the two had spent five years sinking more than euro400 million ($550 million) of their personal fortunes into trying to keep the company going.

The Dublin-based company still employs around 7,700 people worldwide, including around 1,500 in England and 210 in Ireland, despite a spate of no-warning layoffs in recent weeks – most dramatically the surprise shutdown of the crystal plant four weeks ago.

KPS’ silence Friday left key questions unanswered: Does it plan to keep any significant British and Irish manufacturing in operation, with how many workers? To what extent will it take on board the company’s hundreds of millions in debts? Is it obligated to help fix the company’s broken-down pension plan?

That uncertainty spurred Waterford Crystal workers to vow to maintain a round-the-clock vigil indefinitely at their closed workplace until they get acceptable answers to those questions. For the past four weeks, several hundred crystal craftsmen past and present have been occupying the factory’s tourist center, the key attraction in the same-named Irish city, in protest at the shutdown.

Waterford union organizer Jimmy Kelly said that, until KPS makes its plans clear, “the sit-in at the Waterford Crystal visitor center – which has done so much to maintain morale and show to the world the passion the workers have for the past, present and future of the company – will continue.”

In Wedgwood’s central English base of Stoke-on-Trent, Mayor Mark Meredith said he would plead with KPS representatives to maintain jobs and production in the city. “Wedgwood belongs in Stoke-on-Trent,” he said.

Wedgwood has been an iconic name in British pottery for 250 years, after its founder Josiah Wedgwood opened the first Stoke factory in 1759. Waterford Crystal traces its lineage to a factory opened in Waterford, southeast Ireland, in 1783.

Waterford acquired Wedgwood in 1986 to form the present company. It listed on the British and Irish stock exchanges, expanded overseas in the 1990s, and bought fellow Stoke-on-Trent ceramics maker Royal Doulton in 2005.

The company thrived throughout the 1990s but has plummeted into deepening red ink since 2002. The chronic weakness of the U.S. dollar hit the Waterford division particularly hard, because Americans typically account for half of all crystal sales. Cheaper competition in Eastern Europe and Asia, along with modernizing consumer tastes favoring more durable, dishwasher-safe tableware, also took its toll.

In response, the company has gradually closed factories and cut staff in their British and Irish heartlands and moved production largely overseas.

Wedgwood’s production since 2005 has concentrated on a state-of-the-art factory in Indonesia that today employs 1,500 ceramics workers. Most of Waterford’s crystal lines have been handed to Eastern European subcontractors.

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Associated Press writer David Stringer in London contributed to this report.

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