The Russian owner of sports-car maker TVR, 'baby oligarch' Nikolai Smolenski, is in talks to buy the collapsed carmaker MG Rover.

Smolenski, who has a personal fortune estimated at $100 million (£52.5m), has approached administrator PricewaterhouseCoopers with a view to buying the company and manufacturing a full range of Rover cars.

His approach is one of two for the whole of the Longbridge-based group that are being taken seriously by PWC. The other is from the Iranian company Dastaan.

A PWC source confirmed that there were two contenders. 'Both in our judgment are credible in terms of potential financial standing and in terms of commercial logic.' Asked if one of them was Smolenski, who paid a reputed £15m for the Blackpool-based TVR last July, he declined to comment.

Smolenski, in his mid-twenties, is the son of banking oligarch Alexander Smolenski, one of Russia's richest 100 men, and a funder of Boris Yeltsin in the mid-Nineties.

Nikolai is thought to have toured the Longbridge plant last week to take a detailed look at the assets on offer. He is said to be interested in making the full range of cars and investing in the future of the company.

However, there could be difficulties, because Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation (SAIC), the Chinese company that pulled out of talks with MG Rover last month, claims its ownership of intellectual property rights on the Rover 75 and 25 models, along with two of its Powertrain engines, means no other company can either buy or manufacture cars without its permission. Last week, SAIC wrote to PWC saying it would like to buy machinery for manufacturing these models and Powertrain engines.

However, PWC is taking legal advice on the extent of SAIC's hold over the MG Rover assets.

A PWC insider said: 'We have taken advice from a number of sources and we are confident that there are sufficient rights remaining here for a business producing cars to be sold.' He said there were variants of all models across the range that could be manufactured.

SAIC continues to insist that no one else is able to make the cars and engines to which it owns the rights. One SAIC adviser said: 'No one knows more about what intellectual property is needed to make cars than the Chinese, because they have operated for years as licensees to VW and General Motors. They have done a lot of work on this, and they are confident they have the rights.'

Meanwhile, Sir Digby Jones, director general of the Confederation of British Industry, who chaired a meeting of the Rover dealers' task force on Friday, said he was confident that Capital Bank, the car-financing operation of HBOS, would help any of the 130 independent Rover showrooms with viable futures by easing terms on cars that remain on forecourts. This follows claims that MG Rover 'dumped' thousands of cars on dealers in the final days of the business.

· PWC confirmed that the buy-out liability in the MG Rover pension fund, now that the group was in administration, was £430m. PWC administrator Tony Lomas said: 'If you wound it up and went into the insurance market to buy an annuity offering that sort of cover, you would need £430m.'

This was originally denied by Rover after it had been reported by The Observer.