Ford's been flooded with "expressions of interest" to buy Aston Martin.
As a result, it's had to impose an extra round of pre-bidding to weed out frivolous approaches, according to the Financial Times. Investment bank UBS is drawing up a list of bidders and will remove those it considers not to be serious.
Among those said by many to have expressed an interest is AM boss Dr Ulrich Bez -- the man with a Porsche 993 in his living room. However, he's since said that he's not interested in a management buy-out but wants to keep the current management team together for whomever buys the company.
Still in the running are:
- Ex-Ford boss Jac Nasser, backed by investment bank One Equity, the private equity arm of JPMorgan
- Cerberus, a New York-based equity group that employs ex-Ford international operations head David Thursfield
- Magma, a company run by former Ford Europe boss Martin Leach
- A number of private equity groups have expressed interest, reckons the FT, although no-one is commenting.
The price remains contentious. While Ford would like to extract $2 billion (£1.06 billion) from the sale, analysts and bidders remain more fixated on a price about one quarter of that -- so expect the eventual price to be somewhere in the middle.
Here's hoping that, if an investment company buys Aston Martin, it doesn't do the classic investment bank thing of stripping the assets and selling it on for an inflated price.