Oppenhoff & Partner advises on € 3.1 billion “PUMA armoured personnel carrier” project

Press Release 9 July 2009

Following the approval of the Budget Committee of the German Bundestag on 17 June 2009 of the draft submitted by the Federal Ministry of Defence to procure 405 mass-produced vehicles of the new PUMA armoured personnel carrier (APC), the contract was signed on 3 July 2009. The order volume is € 3.1 billion. The contractor is PSM GmbH, owned in equal shares by Rheinmetall Landsysteme GmbH and Krauss-Maffei Wegmann GmbH & Co. KG. The PUMA APC is the largest approved procurement project of the Federal Armed Forces in 2009. The Federal Armed Forces are to be equipped with these modern armoured personnel carriers as of 2012. The PUMA APC will be the standard equipment of the armoured infantry of the Federal Armed Forces and will replace the Marder APC.

Michael Abels, founding partner of Oppenhoff & Partner, has been involved in the project in an advisory capacity since 2002. He advised KMW within the scope of the creation of the project company PSM and has since advised throughout all of the essential phases of the project, including the recent conclusion of the PUMA mass production agreement. Along side the legal departments of Rheinmetall AG (Dr. Andreas Beyer and Rainer Behrend) and KMW (Markus Zimmermann), on the Oppenhoff team Dr. Marc Hilber participated in the realisation of the project.

Oppenhoff & Partner, an independent law firm located in Cologne with more than 50 lawyers, sees itself as a top-ranking legal adviser of enterprises and entrepreneurs, offering a broad range of advice on commercial and tax law. It focuses on the provision of advice to domestic and foreign, large-scale and larger medium-sized enterprises at a regional, national and international level. Recently, for example, Oppenhoff & Partner advised M. DuMont Schauberg on the acquisition of Berliner Zeitung and Telekom on the consequences of the data affair.

Contact at Oppenhoff & Partner
Elmar Salinger, PR Manager
Telephone: +49 (0)221 2091 315
E-mail: elmar.salinger@oppenhoff.eu