Skip to main content

VW's assets have been frozen in Russia.

 

The Ger­man com­pany announced last year that it would stop mak­ing cars in Rus­sia. This included its plant in Kaluga, where it still pays roughly 4,000 employ­ees to stay at home, and an auto­mot­ive assembly plant in Nizhny Novgorod, which it ran with Rus­sian car­maker Gaz.

Gaz last week filed a law­suit against VW, dis­put­ing an agree­ment the two had struck to end a col­lab­or­a­tion that was due to run until 2025 and called for VW’s assets to be frozen as it said the car­maker planned to leave the coun­try «in the nearest future».

The com­pany added that it had applied for approval by Rus­sian state author­it­ies to sell its busi­ness in the coun­try, includ­ing the plant in Kaluga, to a «reput­able Rus­sian investor».

«We hope that the claim will not lead to a delay of the trans­ac­tion, which aims to secure employ­ment and work for the affected employ­ees,» VW added.

Gaz did not imme­di­ately respond to a request for com­ment.

Her­bert Diess, the com­pany’s former chief exec­ut­ive, had said when the Ukraine war broke out last year that its assets in Rus­sia rep­res­en­ted roughly 0.5 per cent of the group’s total.

VW’s woes high­light the chal­lenges west­ern com­pan­ies face as they seek solu­tions for their Rus­sian busi­nesses.

Every com­pany from so-called «unfriendly coun­tries» — the list includes EU mem­bers and the US, among other jur­is­dic­tions — is required to receive state approval to sell its busi­ness in Rus­sia.

Offi­cial cri­teria for this approval are oner­ous: the value of a busi­ness will be determ­ined by Rus­sian author­it­ies and sub­ject to a dis­count of at least 50 per cent.

The frozen assets are about 204mn.

www.sba.tax

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Cloud Bookkeeping

HS2 cost cuts new routes and add delays.

 Trans­port depart­ment offi­cials have begun work on «Project Sil­ver­light» sug­gest­ing the high­speed rail scheme might face four addi­tional years of delay. The planned High Speed 2 rail line faces fur­ther delays of up to four years and more cuts to the project under plans being drawn up by min­is­ters to rein in its bal­loon­ing costs. The extra delays to the coun­try’s biggest infra­struc­ture project would mean that it would not be com­pleted until as late as 2045 — 12 years after ori­gin­ally planned. «This is a func­tion of infla­tion; we are hav­ing to find huge sav­ings because the cost of everything the depart­ment is already doing will have become so much more expens­ive by then,» said one gov­ern­ment offi­cial. In Octo­ber, the FT repor­ted that the Treas­ury had asked HS2’s man­age­ment team to identify poten­tial cuts or «scope reduc­tions» to the high-speed line. Trans­port depart­ment offi­cials have sub­sequently begun work on Project Sil­ver­light aimed at fi...
4 comments
Read more

Google has launched its Bard chat­bot.

  Google has launched its Bard chat­bot in a move to rival OpenAI’s pop­u­lar Chat­GPT, as it seeks to make up lost ground in the race to com­mer­cial­ise gen­er­at­ive arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence tech­no­logy. Google said that Bard, which provides answers to text­based ques­tions, will be run sep­ar­ately from its Google Search engine. In recent weeks, gen­er­at­ive AI has also been integ­rated into widely used pro­ductiv­ity applic­a­tions, such as Google’s Work­space includ­ing Google Docs and Gmail, and Microsoft’s Office 365 soft­ware, as well as into pop­u­lar apps such as Duolingo, allow­ing mil­lions of people to start inter­act­ing with the tech­no­logy. «We want to get feed­back and gradu­ally phase up the num­ber of people who have access to Bard, and the reason for that is we want to be able to test and learn from that before we roll it out very widely,» said Zoubin Ghahramani, vice-pres­id­ent of Google Research. Bard is built on top of Google’s AI tech­no­logy known a...
3 comments
Read more

Doubt on CS's collateral.

  Credit Suisse provided an emergency $140mn loan to Greensill Capital based partly on invoices to companies that deny ever doing the business stated on the documents. The Swiss bank provided the loan in October 2020, less than five months before the collapse of Greensill, a supply chain finance firm that counted former British prime minister David Cameron as a senior adviser. Invoices issued by metals magnate Sanjeev Gupta’s Liberty Commodities and sold to Greensill formed part of the collateral for the loan, according to documents seen by the Financial Times and people familiar with the transaction. Yet several of the parties named on the invoices have told the FT they did no business with Liberty. GFG has consistently denied any wrongdoing. Credit Suisse’s loan had a clause dictating that the collateral value had to be equal to or greater than the $140mn borrowed. The terms of the debt agreement only allowed invoices on Green-sill’s balance sheet to count towards this tally if t...
2 comments
Read more