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July 23 (Bloomberg) -- Porsche SE Chief Executive Officer Wendelin Wiedeking will step down after 16 years, paving the way for a merger between the 911 sports-car maker and Volkswagen AG. Wiedeking, 56, as well as Chief Financial Officer Holger Haerter will leave with immediate effect, Stuttgart-based Porsche said in a statement distributed over the DGAP newswire today. Wiedeking had opposed selling Porsche’s automotive unit to VW, Europe’s largest carmaker. Instead he engineered a strategy of accumulating Volkswagen shares, raising Porsche’s stake in VW to more than 50 percent this year excluding options that could be converted into an additional 20 percent holding. The swoop for VW also boosted Porsche’s debt to 10 billion euros ($14.2 billion), forcing the CEO to turn towards the company’s owners for capital and to court Qatar for an investment. “Wiedeking’s course has split the families and caused major irritations in Porsche’s working ties with VW,” said Stefan Bratzel, head of the Center of Automotive Research Institute in Bergisch Gladbach, Germany. “Wiedeking has no place in a combined VW-Porsche carmaker.” Wiedeking’s salary contract stipulates that he earns 0.9 percent of Porsche’s pretax profit, according to the company. Based on the 8.57 billion-euro pretax income reported for the year through July 2008, the CEO received about 77 million euros, making him better paid than any leader of the 30 companies in Germany’s benchmark DAX Index, which includes VW and not Porsche.

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