Gemballa still missing in Gauteng
2010-02-18 09:01
Reports of German tuning ace Uwe Gemballa’s puzzling disappearance in Johannesburg last week appear to be misconstrued.
Gemballa boarded a plane from Frankfurt to South Africa last Monday and has not been reachable via any means since.
This has greatly upset his business partners, staff (all 40 of them) and customers, who generally entrust the legendary German tuner with staggeringly rare exotic supercars – the like of which Uwe is an expert at modifying.
Rumours of a kidnapping and ransom situation abounded (geared by Gauteng’s rather treacherous reputation amongst Europhiles), yet it would now appear Uwe could simply be on the run.
Uwe Gemballa is known for his outlandish Porsche modifying packages - like this Cayenne-based Tornado.
Authorities drop in at Gemballa HQ
German (and South African) authorities have been quite coy concerning the search for Gemballa, yet they visited Uwe’s Leonsburg facility to do an inventory check this week – usually a precursor to an internal revenue investigation...
It could transpire that Gemballa’s tax filing regime has not been quite, well, up to rigorous German standards.
The stance by German authorities could turn from a missing person’s case to one of tax evasion.
If this is the case customers, who routinely park extraordinarily rare supercars such as Ferrari Enzos and Porsche Carrera GTs in Gemballa’s care, will now have to show full ownership disclosure documentation to have any hope of reclaiming their supercars.
Such a state of affairs could prove potentially embarrassing in itself, as most of the exotics tend to be surreptitiously registered in the first place…
Still regarded as missing, not 'on the run'
As of Wednesday afternoon, authorities in Stuttgart still appear to be investigating Gemballa’s jaunt to South Africa as a missing person’s case.
Considering he has agents in North America, Asia, Australia and even one, bizarrely, in Angola, Gemballa’s jetting off to South Africa did not warrant suspicion at first, as he regularly flies abroad to visit customers and update agents.
Car enthusiasts the world over are hoping the enigmatic German tuning ace surfaces soon, to bring closure to what is rapidly becoming a quite bizarre state of affairs.
