The Swedish car brand Saab, owned by the Dutch Swedish Automobile, has lost its pearls. Even before the company received permission from the court on Wednesday to reorganize, the Swedish state-owned bailiff’s organization Kronofogden seized all 109 museum cars of the company.
A Kronofogden spokesperson confirmed this on Thursday. Now the strange situation has arisen that the bailiff is not allowed to sell the cars during the restructuring of Saab, Saab has lost control of the vehicles, but Saab is allowed to let paying museum visitors look at the vehicles.
The Kronofogden hoped to raise money for the creditors with a sale of the museum pieces, to whom Saab says it owes 150 million euros. The bailiff’s organization found less than a million in Swedish bank accounts. The Swedish service cannot access foreign assets.
The show-piece of the Saab Museum in Trollhättan is the ‘primordial Saab’, the prototype of the company’s very first car from 1946. The mayor of Trollhättan, himself a former Saab employee, has already said that he may want to buy the Saab Museum and believes it can count on broad support from the city council. | © 2011 Marcel Burger for ANP News Agency (original published in Dutch on 22 September 2011)