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This is article petey should pay close attention too.....
http://editorial.autos.msn.com/how-and-why-the-middle-east-is-buying-into-europes-car-companies?icid=autos_0695>1=22034
How (and Why) the Middle East is Buying into Europe's Car Companies
Qatar, Bahrain, and others have taken stakes in major automakers.
By Ray Hutton of Car and Driver
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This past January, a Boeing 747 loaded with 11 Volkswagen Phaetons landed at Doha, the capital of Qatar, in the Persian Gulf. The cars and their drivers had been sent there for one day to chauffeur Volkswagen's senior executives and members of its supervisory board, including chairman Ferdinand Piëch and chief executive Martin Winterkorn. The high-level delegation came to Qatar to attend the country's first auto show and the Middle East Automotive Summit.

By international standards, the Qatar show is a minor regional event. Qatar is a small desert state with a population of about 1 million and a new-car market of ?just 40,000 units a year. It has no vehicle manufacturing, but it does have a lot of oil and natural gas; because of that, Qatar has a lot of money.

It was that money — more than $7 billion of it — that brought the most senior people from Europe's largest car company to Qatar. Qatar Holding, LLC, owns 17 percent of the massive Volkswagen Group.

Qatar started investing in Porsche when the Stuttgart sports-car maker ran into trouble after its audacious attempt to take over Volkswagen. Porsche sold 10 percent of ?its voting shares to Qatar. Now the tables are turned, and VW is bringing Porsche into the Volkswagen Group, with Qatar as its largest shareholder. But Qatar isn't the only Middle Eastern state investing oil riches in the car business.

Actually, the Persian Gulf has been putting money into car companies since the 1970s. In the wake of the first oil crisis, nearly four decades ago, Mercedes-Benz's parent company, Daimler-Benz, benefited from funds from newly rich Kuwait. Since then, Middle Eastern money has become an increasingly important factor for top-end European carmakers. But now, amid political and social turmoil in the region, some of those companies are beginning to feel uncomfortable.

An important chapter in the story dates back to 1977, when Gianni Agnelli, chairman of ?Italy's biggest industrial group, sought outside financing to support Fiat's then-struggling car business. With oil prices on the rise, Middle Eastern producers had money?to spare. Italy's strongest links in the region were with its former colony Libya. The Libyan Arab Foreign Investment Company paid some $400 million for a 15-percent stake in the Fiat Group and appointed two directors to the Fiat board.

This became problematic for Fiat when the el-Qaddafi regime was identified as a sponsor of international terrorism. In 1986, Fiat persuaded a reluctant Libya to sell back its shares. To the likely -discomfort of Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne and the current Fiat management, Libya later acquired — and continues to own — a new stake in Fiat amounting to about two percent.

As with the efforts of ?Middle Eastern countries to raise their status in the world by hosting major sporting events and tourist attractions, buying into car companies is strictly business. These investments look to a post-oil future.
Elsewhere in the Gulf . . .

Ferrari, a Fiat company, has formed a close association with Abu Dhabi, one of the wealthiest and most stable Gulf capitals. In 2002, during a dip in Fiat's fortunes, Ferrari sold 34 percent of its shares to the bank Mediobanca, which in turn sold five percent of Ferrari for $114 million to Mubadala, a state-supported investment firm in Abu Dhabi. Over the past three years, Fiat has bought back both Mubadala and Mediobanca's Ferrari shares, but the Abu Dhabi connection is maintained by the companies' joint involvement in the Yas Marina Formula 1 circuit and the Ferrari World park. Khaldoon Khalifa Al Mubarak, Mubadala's CEO, is a member of ?Ferrari's board.
In 2005, Mubadala took a 17-percent share of the fledgling Spyker sports-car business, which took over Saab Automobiles from General Motors five years later. This February, the Abu Dhabi investment in Spyker-Saab stood at 20 percent.
In 2009, Aabar Investments, a stock fund owned by the Abu Dhabi government, invested $2.7 billion in Daimler. In connected deals, Aabar also took a 30-percent interest in Brawn GP, the world-champion Formula 1 team that was renamed Mercedes Grand Prix, and became a four-percent investor in electric carmaker Tesla Motors.
Kuwait quickly bounced back from the instability caused by the Iraqi invasion in 1990. By 2007, its financial institutions were building a portfolio of luxury properties. Two of them, Investment Dar and Adeem Investment, paid $848 million to the Ford Motor Company for its stake in Aston Martin. Investment Dar also owns 40 percent of Prodrive, the British engineering specialist (run by David Richards, Aston Martin's chairman) that builds Aston's race cars and World Rally Championship Minis for BMW.
KIA — the Kuwait Investment Authority, not the Korean car company — continues to have a stake in Daimler but has been overtaken by Abu Dhabi as its biggest shareholder; Aabar has 9.1 percent of the German company.
Competition seems to be growing between the oil-rich states to become part of the auto industry. Bahrain, the tiny state that neighbors Qatar, likes to claim automotive leadership in the Middle East and is promoting its country as an ideal environment for research and development. Ruf, the German Porsche tuner, has set up a small manufacturing facility there.
The Bahrain Mumtalakat Holding Company is building up to a 50-percent stake in the McLaren Group, which includes the Formula 1 team, and currently owns 50 percent of the McLaren Automotive production-car subsidiary that has just started building the MP4-12C. When McLaren Automotive was established in 2009, managing director Ron Dennis said that he and his longtime partner TAG CEO Mansour Ojjeh (a Saudi Arabian-born entrepreneur) wanted to sell 49 percent of the shares in the new subsidiary. They didn't do so, and the rumor is that the most eager investors were from other Gulf states, which wouldn't sit comfortably with Mumtalakat.
Whether the Bahrain government's appetite for investments will be affected by recent civil unrest remains to be seen, but the Bahrain Grand Prix, opener of the 2011 Formula 1 season, was canceled in March.



The money is in middle east not alabama wow petey is comical lmao!!!