Ha, Ha, Ha, oooh, dear, this Rover story just gets better and better. John Tower and the Phoenix guys have been comprehensively outmanouvered by SAIC.

The Chinese company that
last week spurned a life-saving deal with insolvent MG Rover has an
effective veto over the sale of the company’s assets by the
administrators.

Shanghai
Automotive Industry Corporation (SAIC) paid just £67m in the autumn for
the intellectual property rights to Rover’s Powertrain engine and
transmission systems and the firm’s flagship R75 saloon/estate and R25
car.

Sources
close to SAIC confirmed that should any other company want to buy any
of these assets, they could be prevented from exploiting them. This
effectively means that for only £67m the corporation has got control of
all the assets it wants from Rover, rendering them virtually worthless
to anyone else. It could therefore buy them at a price of its choosing
and ship them out to China.

A
source close to SAIC told The Observer: ‘Nobody else can buy it or make
it. This applies to Powertrain, the Rover 25 and the Rover 75.’ Asked
what SAIC’s next move would be, the source said: ‘We shall see what
happens.’ He admitted that if the events of the past six months had
been a game of cards, the Chinese would have played a near perfect
hand.

That’s it, game over. The assets of the business cannot be bought or used by anyone else without paying the Chinese off. All that’s left is the value of the land the factory sits upon. The only possible buyer for it as a going concern, stripped of its debts and thus possibly viable, is SAIC. Now then who was it who said that this would be a decent method of negotiation? Why, I do think it might possibly have been me.