Thursday April 23, 05:18 PM
VW mulling Porsche counter bid: reports
FRANKFURT (AFP) - Volkswagen (Xetra: 766400 - news) is mulling a takeover of the automotive business of luxury sports car maker Porsche (Xetra: POR3.DE - news) , which would add a new twist in the German industrial saga, press reports said on Thursday.
Directors of VW, the biggest European car maker, are considering making a bid for Porsche AG which would relieve the highly-indebted parent company Porsche SE, the Financial Times Deutschland (FTD) and Financial Times said.
Porsche made an audacious takeover bid for VW, which has sales 15 times larger than its smaller German peer, three and a half years ago.
"The tail would finally stop wagging the dog," said a person familiar with VW thinking, the FT reported.
Porsche SE currently has nine billion euros (11.7 billion dollars) in debt.
A spokesman for the company said he was unaware of any VW takeover plans.
"This plan does not exist as far as I know," the spokesman told AFP.
The head of Porsche's works committee, Uwe Hueck, issued a statement which said: "It bothers me that some people are spreading (ideas) in the media, which have not been discussed or decided on the supervisory board."
And VW financial director Hans Dieter Poetsch said only that "no concrete decision" had been taken following a study of several strategic options regarding the group's structure.
Porsche boss Wendelin Wiedeking is looking for ways to finance the original plan to buy VW and a capital increase is not ruled out, the FTD said, but the spokesman said there had been no decision yet.
The Porsche parent group owns a little more than 50 percent of Wolfsburg-based VW and wants to raise its stake to 75 percent.
A VW spokesman declined to comment on the report.
Porsche's difficulty in financing the purchase of the much bigger VW has raised market speculation in recent weeks.
The magazine Manager said Stuttgart-based Porsche was in talks with possible investors in the Middle East, while VW shareholders met Thursday in a general assembly.
Shares in VW fell by 3.36 percent to 23.47 euros in late Frankfurt trading, while the DAX index (Xetra: news) of leading shares was off by 1.02 percent overall.
Porsche shares gained 9.2 percent to 52.75 euros in over-the-counter trading.
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