Arrival, the UK-based electric vehicle group founded by a former Russian deputy government minister, is closing its Russian operations and has no plans to operate there in the future, one of its most senior executives has said.
The company has faced scrutiny because it was founded by Denis Sverdlov, a businessman who served as Russia’s deputy communications and mass media minister under President Vladimir Putin for 15 months until his resignation in 2013. Although he has spent most of his adult life in Russia, Sverdlov was born in Georgia.
Tom Elvidge, Arrival’s executive vice-president of electrical vehicles, told the Financial Times’ Future of the Car conference on Wednesday that the company had been in the process of shifting its operations out of Russia since Ukraine was invaded at the end of February.
Elvidge said the company had “a team” in Russia, which deal with software.
Asked whether Arrival might face sanctions because of Sverdlov’s former role in Putin’s government, Elvidge stressed that Sverdlov opposed the war.
“Denis has spoken publicly and made his statements very clear that he’s against [the war] and Arrival and Denis are against what is happening and conflict of any kind,” Elvidge said.
Arrival was valued at $13.6bn when it listed on the US’s Nasdaq exchange in March last year. The company is building “micro-factories” in the UK and US and is focused on developing an electric delivery van and then a bus and a car aimed at ride-hailing service drivers.
Elvidge said the process of winding down its Russian operations would take a few more months.
“That’s no small operation but we’ve transported now the majority of our team into Georgia,” he said. “We’ve set up offices in Tbilisi.” He added that the company had no plans to have “any operations in Russia going forward”.
Elvidge rejected suggestions that the company had been slow to begin manufacturing vehicles, saying it was only “months” away from starting to produce vans at its micro-factory in Bicester, Oxfordshire.
The company had been preparing designs for the vehicle for only two years, he stressed, and that setting up production was proving to be “very complex”.
“We’re very prepared for this to be something that takes time to get right,” Elvidge said.