German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in a newspaper interview published on Monday, March 5, that new shareholders should not be admitted to European aerospace company EADS’s shareholder pact. Merkel was answering a question about allowing Russian investors to buy into the pan-European company.

“At the moment, we should not take any more shareholders into the EADS shareholder pact,” Merkel told Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung. “But I support closer industrial cooperation in aircraft construction, as EADS has already begun,” she added.

EADS is a mainly French and German concern assembled from a European merger of aerospace and defense interests that also included Spain in 2000. The aerospace group is run along careful power-sharing lines enshrined in a shareholder pact.

Russia’s state-owned VTB bank rang alarm bells in Paris and Berlin last year when it acquired five percent stake of EADS.

Last year, Merkel made it clear to Russian President Vladimir Putin that it was not desirable for Russia to take a bigger stake in EADS. Putin has repeatedly complained that Russian firms are being unfairly rebuffed in European markets.

Russia is trying to revamp its aerospace sector which is still suffering from post-Soviet woes, and wants to integrate its key industries into the world economy.

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