STOCKHOLM, May 7 (Reuters) - Sweden's Vattenfall VATN.UL said on Tuesday it had appointed Magnus Hall as its new chief executive as the state-owned energy group looks to put behind it the disastrous purchase of Dutch firm Nuon in 2009.

Hall, 54, a 29-year veteran of Swedish forest industry group Holmen HOLMb.ST , will take the reins from Norwegian Oystein Loseth, a former Nuon head, who announced last year he would step down when his contract expired in March next year.

The Vattenfall statement did not make clear the date when Hall would assume his new position.

Vattenfall is slashing costs and selling off non-core assets in the face of lower electricity prices in Europe, retreating from a decade of heavy spending and the purchase of Nuon that has yielded billions of euros of writedowns.

Hall's years at Holmen, where he was chief executive for a decade before stepping down earlier this year, has left him with ample experience of energy issues with paper and pulp companies among the top energy consumers in the Nordic country.

Hall was also chairman of BasEL, an association of forestry, steel, chemical and mining companies which works to promote stable and competitive electricity supplies to Sweden's heavy industries and which counts state-owned miner LKAB and steel firm SSAB SSABa.ST among its members.

Faced with what it expects to be years of weak electricity prices in Europe, Vattenfall is retrenching to its core business

and has said it was looking at the possibility of bringing in investors to "share risk" in its continental and UK businesses.

Hall will be leading this process while seeking to bring down costs at Scandinavia's biggest utility that slumped to a full year loss in 2013, hit by 30 billion Swedish crowns ($4.6 billion) in impairments, forcing it to shelve its annual dividend to the Swedish state for the first time.

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An industrial engineer by training, Hall has also served as the chairman of industry associations Confederation of European Paper Industries (CEPI) and the Swedish Forest Industries Federation. ($1 = 6.5021 Swedish Crowns)

(Reporting by Simon Johnson and Niklas Pollard, additional reporting by Sven Nordenstam; Editing by Alistair Scrutton)

((simon.c.johnson@thomsonreuters.com)(+46 8 700 1045)(Reuters Messaging: simon.c.johnson.reuters.com@reuters.net))

Keywords: VATTENFALL CEO