TO a blast of shouted Mandarin and electronic music, four Vanessa Mae lookalikes in skimpy white outfits stalk onto the stage, two clutching electric violins, one a hollowed-out cello and the last a keyboard slung over her shoulder. They pout at the cameras, thrust their hips at the crowd, stamp their white, knee-length leather boots and they’re off, miming rock-chick style to the heavy back beat of an over-amplified version of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.

Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation, the company that left MG Rover at the altar, is launching a new concept car at its home motor show. It may be a novice to the international car game, but it has already mastered the car-show basics: loud music and sex help to sell.

Unlike its western counterparts, SAIC’s presentation does not feature a rabble-rousing address from a charismatic chief executive. Hu Maoyuan, the company’s senior economist, senior engineer, chairman and party secretary, a short, thickset man with a broad, smiling face, enters in a file of blue-suited executives, sits quietly through the performance and the reading of a speech, then leaves. Earlier in the morning he was shown round SAIC’s sprawling exhibit of new models, the visit more like a tour by visiting royalty than the appearance of a company boss.

Hu may be low-profile, but as the boss of China’s biggest carmaker he is important. During the morning a steady stream of western car executives beat a path to the door of his office on the SAIC stand to pay their respects. China is the promised land for hard-pressed automotive groups, a fast-growing market that will soon be the second biggest in the world, and a place where it is still possible to make money selling cars rather than by lending customers the money to buy them. If you are serious about the car business, Hu is a man you need to know.

The four Midlands businessmen who own MG Rover — the “Phoenix Four” — must have thought they had hit the jackpot when they started joint-venture negotiations with SAIC last year. Unlikely as it seemed, struggling MG Rover had two things SAIC badly wanted: the technology, experience and confidence to build new cars, and the brands to sell them.

SAIC may be China’s biggest domestic player, producing 617,000 cars last year, but to date it has been reliant on its western joint-venture partners, Volkswagen and General Motors, for designs and brands. SAIC has nothing to call its own, a galling truth for a company eager to join the automotive industry elite.

MG Rover’s shaky finances meant the negotiations came to nought. SAIC insisted that the British side of the proposed joint venture would have to be able to remain solvent for two years after the deal was struck.

An 11th-hour investigation commissioned from the accountants Ernst & Young — after a year of talks — found MG Rover was well on its way to a full-blown financial crisis. SAIC will not discuss the detail of the negotiations, but a spokeswoman for the company confirmed to The Sunday Times at last week’s Shanghai Motor Show that the cancellation of the deal had been “purely a business decision”.

“It was not until the last stage of due diligence that we found there was a possibility, a risk, of insolvency,” said Zhu Xiang Jun. “It is a cause of genuine regret that we were not able to go ahead.”

SAIC executives were scornful of comments by John Towers, the MG Rover chairman, that a deal had been “20 minutes” from being concluded.

Asked about the accuracy of the claim, one SAIC source said: “How accurate do you think the figure of £1 billion was?” — a reference to Towers’s claims last November that the deal was all but done, and that it could result in a £1 billion investment programme in new models.

The collapse of the deal, despite desperate attempts by the Labour government to revive it with an election just weeks away, meant the end of the line for MG Rover. Administrators were appointed and 5,000 laid off work, with another 10,000-plus jobs in the West Midlands estimated to be at risk.

But SAIC may have got most of what it wanted. Under a £67m technology-transfer deal last year, it bought the intellectual-property rights — the blueprints of how the cars were built, and the right to use them — for the Rover 25, the Rover 75, and for the K-series engines that power Rover and other cars. The money was reportedly paid in November, but a deed of assignment lodged at Companies House indicates the agreement was signed on August 5.

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