Zagato & CPP in Joint Venture. Really, they are.

CPP and Zagato have announced that they are in a joint venture. But a dig round Italy’s Companies House would perhaps suggest otherwise.

A couple of weeks ago we reported that CPP – owners of Spyker and Bowler – has quitely gobbled up Milanese Car Design Studio Zagato at some point in 2010. Which made sense.

It made sense because it is CPP that builds many of the Zagato cars you can think of. They’ll be building the new Aston Martin Zagato when that starts production next year (as CPP ends production of the Aston Martin One-77), and they’ve previously built Zagato cars like the Ferrari 550GTZ and the Bentley GTZ.

And we thought it was around the time that Zagato were struggling to find enough loose change to build another Bentley Zagato that CPP stepped in to help out. That is what is now being described as a ‘Joint Venture’. And we’re sure it is. Sort of.

It’s a joint venture in the sense that Zagato keeps its own identity. It’s a joint venture in the sense that CPP (Global Holdings) and Zagato (now officially CPP Milan SLR) are funded by Vladimir Antonov. And it’s a joint venture in the sense that both CPP and Zagato have a common interest in the Zagato name being ‘safe’.

But when you consider that CPP has no interest in really having a public profile at all, isn’t it a little odd that this joint venture is called CPP Milan? Wouldn’t you have expected that it would be something like Zagato CPP or The Zagato Partnership or, really, anything with Zagato in?

So as our original story was that CPP had bought Zagato, we thought we out to break out the phrase book and take the Cars UK plastic out of mothballs and get on the phone to the land of Berlusconi.

We may have inadvertently ordered a mozzarella and tomato salad and a nice bottle of Pinot Gris to start with, but once we’d cranked up the translator we managed to garner a pile of documents on CPP Milan SRL from the nice signorina.

As far as we can tell, CPP Milan SRL was formed in June of 2010 (just a month or two after we learned Zagato were fishing down the sofa to build another Bentley with CPP) and, also as far as we can tell, the sole owner is CPP (Manufacturing) Ltd, with a ‘Pledge’ from Investbank. The  First Deputy Chairman of Investbank at the time was one Vladimir Antonov.

It appears that CPP Milan has also acquired ‘SZ Design SRL in Liquidation’ which we assume was the old Zagato Company. Oh, and the sole director appears to be a Brit from Surrey.

But CPP Milan SLR is a joint venture between CPP and Zagato. Of course it is.

And all the better for it.