Muller’s sports car brand has been sitting on his ass for years and most of the business units have been declared bankrupt. But at the end of last year it was announced that Muller wanted to revive the company with the help of two Russian business partners. For this, a contract was concluded with the British company Spyker Ltd., where the remnants of the group are housed.
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The Russian lenders are the exorbitantly wealthy Boris Rotenberg and Mikhail Pessis. Rotenberg has been friends with President Putin since childhood. That close relationship is now costing him dearly, it seems. The businessman is worth about $1.2 billion, according to business magazine Forbes. He earned that money as a banker and in the oil and gas sector.
The British government has put him on the sanctions list today after Russia recognized two renegade provinces of Ukraine as independent states yesterday and then crossed the border with soldiers. After the annexation of De Krim in 2014, his brother, Arkadi Rotenberg, was already put on the sanctions list.
‘I did not know’
The fact that Rotenberg is on the UK sanctions list also immediately means the British Spyker Ltd. can’t do business with him. “I didn’t know that. That’s new to me,” says Victor Muller in a first reaction. “But I don’t find anything surprising anymore.”
Whether the future plans for Spyker fall into the water? “That could be true. Were it not that I do not only do business with Rotenberg.” According to Muller, there is nothing wrong with Pessis.
Muller did not want to say much more about the consequences of Rotenberg’s disappearance.
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Russia, Germany and the Netherlands
Muller and his Russian partners had envisioned that Spyker could build cars in Russia and Germany in the future, with final assembly taking place in the Netherlands. The question was whether the project would actually get off the ground.
The same plans were already made public in the summer of 2020. Last year there should have been cars off the production line, but nothing came of it.
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