Sberbank is demanding that General Motors reimburse expenses incurred by the state bank from its failed bid to purchase Opel, the U.S. carmaker’s European unit, Sberbank president German Gref said Friday.
“We’ve incurred costs in this deal, and therefore we’re holding negotiations with the company now. We’ve formulated our expenses related to this deal and have presented our proposals for the company to reimburse our expenses voluntarily,” Gref said in comments on Vesti-24 state television.
If GM does not meet Sberbank’s requirements, the bank will file a lawsuit to recover the outlays, Gref said.
In early November, GM abruptly ended talks on the sale of Opel to a consortium of Sberbank and Canadian auto parts maker Magna International, scuttling a deal that the Russian government had hoped would help it rescue the domestic auto industry and further integrate its economy with the West.
Gref said GM’s refusal to sell Opel was baseless, while the liabilities that the state bank had incurred were too serious to simply terminate the negotiations.
“We do not consider the form and content of GM’s refusal as substantial. We think the commitment from GM went so far that they should have sealed the deal,” he said. “This took nine months of negotiations; 9,000 initialed pages of the contract were ready to be signed. And GM quit two days before the deal was to be closed.”
He did not specify how much Sberbank was seeking.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who was a vocal supporter of the Canadian-Russian bid for Opel, said earlier this year that the deal should be part of the state’s strategy for developing the auto sector.
When the deal fell through, Putin lashed out at GM, saying there might be repercussions down the road because of GM’s “disregard for its partners.” The automaker is now majority owned by the U.S. government, although the White House has repeatedly said that running the company is being left to its board of directors.
GM went through a brief bankruptcy in the United States this summer that did not include Opel. The company had been planning to sell the unit as part of its restructuring, but said in November that it considered Opel a strategic asset and would develop the unit on its own.
Magna and Sberbank were in line to get 55 percent in Opel and GM’s British unit Vauxhall for 500 million euros ($720 million). Opel workers would have received 10 percent in exchange for concessions on labor costs, while the remaining 35 percent would have stayed with GM.
Gref said he was disappointed that the deal was canceled because it would have helped Russian carmakers.
“I’m very sorry that the deal has failed. It’s a case when one can say: ‘I feel bad for the state,’” he said, quoting a famous line from the Soviet movie “White Sun of the Desert.”
Calls to the cell phone of a GM spokesman in Russia went unanswered Sunday. After the deal fell through, Magna expressed its regret but indicated that it was looking forward to continued cooperation with GM and Opel.
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