Since last year, all transactions for the sale of Russian assets owned by foreign companies must be approved by the government commission on foreign investment. Schaeffler is now also trying to coordinate the sale of its subsidiaries – Scheffler RUS and Scheffler Russland – to PromAvtoConsult.
To speed up receiving approval from the government commission, the general director of the potential buyer, Roman Vovk, knocks on the thresholds of the bosses’ offices. Vovk tells his high-ranking interlocutors how PromAvtoConsult is looking forward to completing the deal in order to resume supplies of auto components to the GAZ group, which is under Western sanctions (the Gorky Automobile Plant also produces military equipment). Information about one of these meetings – allegedly with a certain economic adviser to the President of Russia – leaked out, in particular, on March 10 about it wrote Spiegel magazine.
However, the slender legend suddenly began to crumble. As it turned out from the annual report of the Schaeffler Group, the “Russian” PromAvtoConsult LLC is a domestic company only in name. There is some agreement on the transfer of shares of PromAvtoConsult LLC to a holding company from the EU, which is controlled by Siegfried Wolf, a member of the supervisory board of the Schaeffler Group. As a result, as the German concern states, the sale of Russian assets to an EU company guarantees that “the applicable sanctions regimes will continue to apply after the completion of the transaction.” In the same spirit, Schaeffler explained his position news agency Reuters.
One can only imagine the surprised faces of Roman Vovk’s Russian counterparts, who, reading Schaeffler’s comments news agency Reuters, realize how they were shamelessly tried to deceive them with promises of a quick breakthrough of the sanctions blockade.
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