Rebuilding the auto industry
Porsche supervisory board member Wolf is said to have offered help to Putin
4/7/2023 11:43 am
After the start of the Ukraine war, the Russian auto industry was hit particularly hard by Western sanctions. A member of the Porsche supervisory board, of all people, wants to help with the reconstruction – and turns directly to President Putin.
With the Russian attack on Ukraine, Volkswagen is putting its business activities in Russia on hold – in addition to the Western sanctions, a severe blow to the Russian auto industry. According to a report by “Spiegel”, help is said to have come from a member of the supervisory board of VW’s major shareholder Porsche SE. Austrian entrepreneur Siegfried Wolf is said to have written to Russian President Vladimir Putin in January, offering to help rebuild the Russian auto industry.
In the letter, Wolf suggested that Putin revive “the legendary Russian Volga brand.” For the comeback, the Austrian wanted to use the factory facilities and know-how of the VW Group. After the war began, VW shut down production at its own plant in Kaluga and dropped out of a manufacturing partnership with the Russian carmaker GAZ in Nizhny Novgorod.
Škoda with Russian design
Siegfried Wolf has been a member of the supervisory board at Porsche SE since 2021.
(Photo: Porsche SE)
Wolf’s plan was to start building cars of the VW brand Škoda again in the two plants from the second half of 2023: First, the Rapid model will be produced in Kaluga, and later the Octavia, Kodiaq and Karoq models in Nizhny Novgorod, Wolf explained in his Letter to Putin. The vehicles were to be given a Russian design and “completely redesigned externally” in order to bring out “the characteristic features” of the legendary Volga and Pobeda models.
Thanks to his initiative, “the needs of Russian consumers for high-quality and reliable vehicles will be met,” he writes, and “a total of over 12,000 high-tech jobs” will be created. All of this forms “the basis for the further development of an independent and modern automotive industry in the Russian Federation”. According to Wolf, the operator of the project will be the Russian company PromAvtoKonsalt, “which I own”. The industrial partner is the GAZ Group, which is the focus of the sanction authorities. “Under today’s difficult conditions,” writes Wolf, there is a shortage of high-quality cars in Russia. His “new investment project to restart car production” could “solve this problem”.
Wolf apparently wants to implement this together with the leading Russian car manufacturer GAZ. For this he needs a loan of 60 billion rubles from the Russian government, the equivalent of around 800 million euros at the time of the offer, it is said. A “fundamental agreement with Volkswagen’s top management” has already been reached, he wrote.
Volkswagen and Porsche “without knowledge”
When asked by “Spiegel”, Volkswagen clearly distanced itself from Wolf’s proposal: The board of directors had “no knowledge whatsoever” about his letter “and its irritating content”. Although Wolf’s company PromAvtoKonsalt was also one of the prospective buyers, the top management had not given any promises to individual interested parties before the completion of the sales process. “It is therefore not comprehensible for us how third parties could be referred to it.” The VW group decided in March on another prospective buyer for its Russian business, according to the magazine, it is the auto dealership group Avilon.
Wolf left an extensive inquiry from the magazine unanswered, as did the GAZ Group, the Kremlin and the PromAvtoKonsalt company. Porsche SE only said about Siegfried Wolf’s personnel and his Russia initiative: “Porsche SE has not and had no knowledge of the letter you mentioned from Mr. Wolf.” Porsche SE did not answer the question of whether the VW parent still had confidence in its supervisory board Wolf.