Among the Mercedes assets at risk is a factory outside Moscow that opened in 2019 with Russian President Vladimir Putin in attendance along with then-Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche.
The facility, seen as key for access to lucrative government contracts, employs more than 1,000 people and produces the E-Class sedan and SUV models. Fitted with robots and other cutting-edge automation, the factory can produce 20,000 vehicles per year.
Mercedes said earlier this month that it was suspending production at the plant.
Russia accounts for 2 percent of Mercedes’s sales, according to an estimate from Bloomberg Intelligence. The company declined immediate comment.
Mercedes’s Russian subsidiaries also have liabilities to banks of about 1 billion euros, and the company said it has issued guarantees for the debt.
German companies have suffered expropriations from foreign governments in the past — a factor some economic historians have cited for the country’s unwillingness to invest money from its large current account surplus overseas.
After the U.S. entered the first world war, its government seized the U.S. operations of Germany’s Merck, leading to the establishment of Merck & Co, now a wholly separate pharmaceutical company.
