The thief-proof, bomb-proof Mercedes of Jurgen Schrempp, the head of DaimlerChrysler, has been stolen from under his nose. Herr Schrempp’s £500,000 limousine with 5cm-thick steel plating, a landmine-resistant petrol tank and bullet-proof windows could drive on, even accelerate, after the tyres had been shot out or lacerated with spikes.

It was the most secure vehicle in the DaimlerChrysler range: a Mercedes S600 that weighs 3.5 tonnes and, according to police investigators in Stuttgart, is probably already serving some safety-conscious Russian entrepreneur. “This was almost certainly a contract theft,” one officer said.

The 60-year-old chief executive locked the car and left it for 20 minutes while he dashed into an evening business meeting in Stuttgart, the centre of DaimlerChrysler’s operations in Europe. He was travelling without a chauffeur or the customary bodyguard.

By the time he returned, a gang had overcome all the security systems, rolled the car on to a transporter and made their getaway. They also blocked the satellite navigation and tracking systems.

Petra Roth, the Mayor of Frankfurt, was luckier: this month her Mercedes 600 disappeared from her chauffeur’s garage but it was tracked by satellite.

The Germans were long concerned that the eastward enlargement of the European Union would turn the country into a playground for car thieves. Most thefts are in Berlin, which is within an hour’s drive of the Polish border.

Co-ordination between the Polish and German police forces is very close and the number of thefts has fallen from a peak of 105,000 in 1993 to just over 31,000. But East-West theft concentrates less on quantity, more on quality.

The bulk car thefts of the mid-1990s were spearheaded by Chechen gangs and Kosovo Albanians, but nowadays the gangs operating in Germany are often steered by Lithuanians and Slovaks, reflecting the new borders of the European Union.

The pattern of car theft in Germany and much of Western Europe is, therefore, an expression of the tastes of the new rich in these EU borderland states. Armour-plated cars are the real prize; Herr Schrempp’s Mercedes could fetch close to £550,000 in Ukraine, the Caucasus and Russia.

Interpol believes that more than a million stolen Western cars have landed in Russia since the collapse of communism, creating a grey market between East and West.

Insurance companies, realising that it was almost impossible to track down a stolen car once it was on Russian soil, have been dealing with private search agencies. One, Via- Avto, charged roughly 40 per cent of the value of a vehicle to secure its return.

Russian police raids last month on Via-Avto showed that a cross-section of the Russian elite benefited from stolen cars, from politicians to customs and police officers.

The chief auditor of the Moscow prosecutor’s office, for example, drove an Audi A8 that had been stolen in Germany.

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