In the wake of GM re-taking full control of Opel, Opel’s former boss Hans Demant stepped down to make room for Nick Reilly. Demant’s new title was GM Vice President, Global Intellectual Property Rights. His job was described as being “responsible for protecting GM’s property rights globally, for example in conjunction with business alliances, partnerships and transactions.”
That job is the GM equivalent of keeping track of the Willow Ptarmigan, Common Ravens, and Snow Buntings population of Nome Alaska. It comes as no surprise that Demand quit. At age 59, he could have taken early retirement. Instead, he took a job with the competition.
Effective October 1, 2010, Demant will be in charge of international project coordination at Volkswagen AG. He reports directly to Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn. According to Winterkorn, their “successful growth strategy calls for the intensive coordination of our international projects.” No kidding. There is no shortage of that at Volkswagen.
Demant is an engineer by training. He started at Opel as project manager for the Corsa in 1989. Demant assumed technical responsibility for all of GM’s small car projects worldwide in 1997. He was appointed Vice President Engineering at General Motors Europe in 2001 and in addition named Managing Director of Adam Opel AG in 2004. When matter got heated during the Opel/Magna/German government battles, Demant was conspicuously quiet. He probably was busy planning his escape from Nome.
I thought there was lots of “intellectual property” at Opel – doesn’t it need protecting? We have been told that the Opel research center was important to GM.
As an engineer, this sounds like a job for some lawyers. No wonder he left.
Maybe he just got tired of the shenanigans, and wanted to work for a company with trustworthy accounting.
Bertel, Why didn’t he retire from Opel, and THEN take the job w/VW?
Once you retire, you are blocked from doing anything for a while….
Don’t the car companies put non-compete clauses in their employment contracts that prohibit employees from jumping ship to another company? I know that’s pretty common for tech companies.
This is Germany. Non-competes for employees are tricky and usually unenforceable. There is a constitutional right of freedom of occupation. If you sell a company (which Demant did not) a non-compete may be enforceable for a few years. In any case, a non-compete must be for good value received, i.e. they must pay you (at least half of what you earned before) during the non-compete period.
German labor contracts usually have no non-compete clause. If the non-compete clause is added (usually by a foreign employer too cheap or too ignorant to hire a German lawyer) your German lawyer will tell you: “Sign it. It’s against the law. If a clause is against the law, it counts as non-written.” A common escape is that the non-compete may not constitute “an inequitable obstacle to the employee’s future career.”
The German auto industry is quite promiscuous, and people change partners quite often.