Porsche should have right to vote on VW bylaw: CFO

INGOLSTADT, Germany (Reuters) - Porsche, which expects to get control of Volkswagen in the coming months, wants to vote again on a VW statute requiring an 80 percent majority threshold for key decisions by shareholders.

"(If the 80 percent is permissible) then there must be a new vote (to approve it) again," Porsche finance chief Holger Haerter told Reuters on the sidelines of the Audi annual general meeting.

He was referring to a bylaw that grants rival VW shareholder Lower Saxony a blocking minority with just 20 percent of votes.

German law allows incorporated companies to have higher thresholds for decisions that usually require 75 percent approval, such as domination agreements that transfer a subsidiary's full profits to the parent.

Haerter said Porsche as VW's largest shareholder should have the right to vote again on this 80 percent hurdle, which was put into the company's statutes by the German government and Lower Saxony before the state-owned carmaker was privatized in 1960.

He declined to say whether he felt that Germany's Christian Democrat Chancellor, Angela Merkel, would abandon her party ally and popular head of Lower Saxony, Christian Wulff, and oppose draft legislation that would sign into federal law a blocking minority for VW's home state.

The legislation was proposed by Merkel's coalition partner Social Democrats but has been attacked by conservative politicians.

"We still believe the Volkswagen Law is in violation of European law, the new version as well," Haerter said.

(Reporting by Christiaan Hetzner; Editing by Louise Ireland)