The corporate troubleshooter David James today dropped plans to buy MG Rover after failing to agree on a joint bid with China's Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation.
Mr James, who was called in by the government to revive the Millennium Dome, was part of a consortium which had plans to retain the production of MG Rover cars in Britain.
The plans depended on SAIC's willingness to immediately buy the Powertrain engine-making division from the consortium and the Chinese organisation's commitment to acquire the rest of the Rover assets a year later.
This would have given the consortium the chance to borrow money against the Rover assets to get the MG TF Sports car operation - the jewel in the Rover crown - up and running.
However, it became clear over the weekend that SAIC was unwilling to give the required commitments, Mr James said.
"I thought they would accept it, because it would be such a logical step. It gave them ultimately the confident certainty that they would get every bit of the assets that they needed," he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.
"We would have put them on our board and given them 25% of our new MG company as a gift. It would have been a very logical progression towards an eventual time when SAIC would have owned everything."
MG Rover called in the administrators in April after the collapse of joint venture talks with SAIC, leading to the loss of 5,500 jobs at the Longbridge, Birmingham.
Attention will now turn to Nanjing Automobile, which has also expressed interest in the production of a range of MG Rover cars.
Nanjing is being advised by Nick Stephenson, one of the Phoenix Four groups of Midlands businessmen who bought MG Rover from BMW for £10 five years ago.
However, SAIC is not out of the picture yet. It has held talks with other former car executives, including Martin Leach, formerly of Ford of Europe, about a scaled-down version of the original MG Rover/SAIC joint venture idea.
This week's scheduled visit to Britain by Chen Hong, the president of SAIC, has fuelled speculation that the company might yet want to salvage something from the original proposal.
