Legal dispute between Lotus and former chief Dany Bahar resolved

Lotus’s parent company, DRB-HICOM, and the company's former boss, Dany Bahar, have agreed to drop their claims against one another — without disclosing any financial terms — one month before the actions were due to be heard by the High Court in London.

Malaysian-based DRB informed its home stock exchange of the deal last week.

Lotus’s parent firm dismissed Bahar soon after it acquired Proton, which owns Lotus, in 2012, and promptly announced an action against Bahar for what it viewed as his poor financial management of the sports car company.

Bahar made a £6.7m counter-claim for unfair dismissal. The new settlement is not expected to have any major impact on Lotus operations, according to DRB’s statement.

Bahar joined Lotus from Ferrari in 2009 and filled the company with high-priced engineers and designers. Within a year he announced a radical plan to launch five new models, revealing concepts of most of them at a celebrity-packed event held at the 2010 Paris motor show. 

The plan collapsed when DRB-HICOM acquired Proton in 2012, and announced that it would concentrate on only one of the planned models, the Esprit.

DRB has since announced that it will invest £100 million in Lotus. In the light of this it has secured another £10 million from the UK government’s Regional Growth Fund. 

The investment will be used to create new models, which DRB claims could generate up to 300 new jobs. Within the past month, former Peugeot-Citroën boss Jean-Mark Gales has joined Lotus as chief executive officer.

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