Sweden’s prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt had his fill of failed negotiations. Returning home from round-the-clock talks at the Copenhagen climate conference, he said that he saw the Saab collapse coming. Sweden’s prime minister is “unsurprised” by the collapse of the sale, says Reuters.  Asked if he was surprised, Reinfeldt  said: “No, the process was built around a loss-making company and an American owner that owned Saab for 20 years and made a profit in one of the 20.  It’s clear that it was not successful enough.” Sweden’s head blames GM for the failure.

Fredrik Reinfeldt said GM had failed to make Saab strong enough to survive.

“Basically, they GM have not been successful enough at building Saab’s profitability, and they have not either come up to those volumes which modern carmakers probably need,” the premier said in an interview on Swedish public radio.

That’s the charitable way to look at it. The other version is that GM can’t even dispose of its unloved brands in an orderly fashion. Opel was withdrawn. The Saturn-Penske deal fell through. Even the Hummer-Tengzhong deal is stuck somewhere in never-never-land.

BAIC would have been more than willing to take Saab completely off GM’s hands, instead of just buying used tooling and machinery. Ironically, hours before the announcement of the failure to sell Saab, BAIC had signaled their intention for further cooperation with Saab, Dow Jones had on its wire. It wouldn’t be astonishing if the large Beijing expat community receives a large influx of engineers from Trollhättan. A friendly IKEA beckons.