Mercedes-Benz Classic Cars . CZ

..By the early 1970s, some 14 per cent of the share capital, which had now reached DM1,189 million, was in the hands of the Quandt Group. That was why the public was shocked by the news that broke on the 28 November 1974: the majority of the shares held by Quandt had been sold abroad – though no-one knew precisely who the buyer was. Even Herbert Quandt himself claimed not to know who had acquired the shares, which had been handled by the Dresdner Bank. Finally, on 2 December, pressure from the supervisory board, the German government and the Bundesbank (Federal Bank of Germany) led to the mystery being solved: it was revealed that the sheikhdom of Kuwait had bought into Daimler-Benz, but had declared that it wished neither to occupy a seat on the supervisory board nor to interfere in the business – and this proved to be the case in the years that followed.

The public was rapidly reassured, given that Deutsche Bank still held 28.5 per cent and Flick 39 per cent of the shares – so nobody needed to fear a ‘foreign sell-out’. But what nobody knew at this point was that Friedrich Flick was also negotiating to sell his shares to an oil-producing country – Iraq. When Deutsche Bank boss Franz Heinrich Ulrich, who was chairman of the Daimler-Benz supervisory board, was told this by Flick during his Christmas vacation in St. Moritz, he managed to persuade the latter to retain 10 per cent of his shares and promised that Deutsche Bank would buy the remaining 29 per cent for DM2 billion. The intention, stressed Ulrich, was not to expand the bank’s involvement in the company but rather to keep the share package in the market..