Biz Watch

And Now, The Love Truck
Volkswagen's assembly plant in Puebla, Mexico, is cranking out 3,000 special-edition old-style Beetles. But when the last one comes off the factory floor on July 30, the Bug's amazing 70-year era will officially end. Chief executive Bernd Pischetsrieder, however, has been too busy trying to engineer the €90 billion company's next era to get choked up over the passing of this one.

INDICATORS Blood On The Tracks British police charged six rail bosses and two firms with manslaughter stemming from a train crash that killed four passengers in October 2000. Managers at infrastructure controllers Network Rail and maintenance company Balfour Beatty are alleged to have known in advance of a broken rail. Thief Executive Officers More than a third of companies worldwide were victims of fraud in the past two years, according to a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers. On average, firms claimed a loss of $2.2 million. An Image Problem Fearing one of its own products could be used for industrial espionage, South Korea's Samsung has banned the use of camera phones in its factories.

He just pumped another €500 million into VW's China operation, which he sees as the next promised land for selling low-priced cars. He's skipping the price war his German competitors, BMW and DaimlerChrysler, have waged in the U.S., dismissing what he calls "incentives of mass destruction." That has cost him U.S. market share, but he says it's preserving profit. But now the company best known for the tiny "people's car" is thinking about trucks — big ones. And buses. And diesel engines. Industrial customers want manufacturers to deliver entire, diverse fleets. So Pischetsrieder has been talking to shareholders of Munich truckmaker MAN and Sweden's Scania, in which VW already has a stake, about creating Europe's third-largest truckmaker (behind DaimlerChrysler and Volvo). "There are question marks over the strategic sense of a move into heavy trucks on the part of VW," says Commerzbank analyst Robert Ashton, adding that Pischetsrieder may actually be trying to sell off VW's own minuscule truck operation, which made just 19,000 vehicles last year, compared to DaimlerChrysler's 222,000. Then we'd have to mourn the passing of yet another VW icon: the microbus.

Gunning For Oil
A raid by armed, masked police on the headquarters of Russia's giant Yukos oil corporation last week escalated the standoff between the Kremlin and Yukos owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia's richest man. His problems started when a senior associate, Platon Lebedev, was accused of the fraudulent privatization of a fertilizer company in 1994. Since then, accusations have been made — though no charges have been brought — that Yukos may have avoided paying taxes. The raid also pushed down its share price by 6.5% in a day, and spooked investors. The confrontation was triggered by members of the security services hostile to the new billionaires. Khodorkovsky is funding the Kremlin's opposition, leaving more business-oriented leaders to wonder how far President Vladimir Putin is willing to go for revenge. — By Paul Quinn-Judge

The Bottom Line
	Technical assistance ... from the U.S. will always be a case of the fox guarding the henhouse
		ASIA RUSSELL, spokeswoman for the Health Global Access Project, on intellectual property guidance for anti-AIDS drugs in Africa