Saturday June 6, 05:28 PM
Qatar ready to help Porsche take over VW: report
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BERLIN (AFP) - Qatar is ready to help German carmaker Porsche (Xetra: POR3.DE - news) take full control of Volkswagen (Xetra: 766400 - news) , Europe's biggest carmaker, according to a report due out Monday in the German magazine Focus.
The emir of the gas-rich Gulf state has given his verbal agreement to Porsche boss Wendelin Wiedeking to take a stake via the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), said the magazine.
A Porsche spokesman contacted by AFP refused to comment Saturday.
In March, Qatar's emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani told another German weekly, Der Spiegel: "We will certainly invest in the German automotive sector."
It was just a question of finding the right time and the right price, he added.
He was speaking a week after Abu Dhabi's Aabar Investment fund announced it had invested 1.95 billion euros (2.59 billion dollars) in another German car company, Daimler (Xetra: 710000 - news) .
Heavily indebted Porsche said last month that it was now seeking a merger with VW, in which it already holds a 51 percent stake, rather than taking over the much bigger car maker.
But tension between the two auto manufacturers has hampered the process after they gave themselves four weeks to agree terms.
A new investor would give them access to much-needed fresh capital and would allow them to envisage the possibility of returning to their original takeover plan.
Christian Wulff, the leader of Germany's Lower Saxony region, which has shares in Volkswagen, told Focus magazine that he had no objection to Qatari investment.
"From the start, I envisaged such as solution," he told the magazine.
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