Ecclestone In Takeover Bid To Buy Saab
F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone has emerged as a principal investor in a consortium bid to buy struggling Swedish carmaker Saab leading to speculation that the brand might enter the sport should his approach be successful.
Ecclestone has joined forces with Luxembourg-based private investment company Genii Capital, which recently invested in Renault’s F1 team, to table a bid.
Loss-making Saab has been put up for sale by its current owner, US giant General Motors (GM).
A second offer for Saab has also emerged from the Dutch sports carmaker Spyker and it is believed that GM has also received a third bid from a Swedish consortium.
The latter group is said to include Haakon Samuelsson, a former executive with truck firms MAN and Scania, and Jan Nygren, a former politician and one-time executive with the Saab aerospace company.
Ecclestone commented: ‘Saab is a good brand that has probably been neglected by the current owners. We don’t own it yet, so let’s see what happens.’
Genii said that it would ‘aggressively work towards a successful closing of the transaction with all the relevant stakeholders of the company’.
It added that Saab has ‘tremendous brand value in a number of key automotive markets, as well as an innovative image’.
Spyker’s bid for Saab is its second, having previously made an unsuccessful approach on 20th December, two days after GM said it would close down the Swedish company if no suitable sale could be agreed.
No details have been revealed about how much either Spyker or Genii and Ecclestone are offering for Saab.
GM has been trying to sell Saab since January last year. In June, GM announced that it had agreed to sell Saab to sports carmaker Koenigsegg, only for the Swedish company to pull out of the deal in November.
Saab, which employs 3,400 people in Sweden, lost £255m in 2008, and it has not made a profit since 2001.
The company is due to resume production on 11th January following a four-week shut down for the Christmas and New Year period.
Four new teams have joined the F1 grid for 2010 as Ecclestone looks to counter the move by the likes of Honda and BMW to withdraw from the sport.
