Porsche not planning now to raise Volkswagen stake

30 Jul, 2007

German sports car maker Porsche is not currently considering raising its 31 percent stake in Volkswagen once a law capping voting rights is repealed, a German newspaper reported on Sunday.
"That question is not being raised as yet," Chairman Wolfgang Porsche told Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, when asked whether the company would increase its control of Europe's largest carmaker once the European Court of Justice strikes down the VW Law, a move expected later this summer.
The federal law guarantees special rights for the German state of Lower Saxony, where VW's headquarters in Wolfsburg are located, as a shareholder as well as preventing any one individual investor from exercising more than 20 percent of their voting rights.
Wolfgang Porsche did not deny that the Porsche and Piech families who control the sports car maker were immune to the idea of controlling VW itself, effectively founded in 1937 by Beetle designer and family patriarch Ferdinand Porsche.
"The thought is not unappealing, that's true," said the chairman, who along with Volkswagen chairman Ferdinand Piech counts Ferdinand Porsche as his grandfather.

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