Hawtai Motor, the unsuccessful pursuer of Saab, has been penalized by China Association of Automobile Manufacturers (CAAM) for posting fictitious sales, according to source close to the matter. In its May issue of Auto Production and Sales Report, CAAM put down "zero" for Hawtai sales as it deemed false and unusable the data from the company.

The source says that unreliable sales numbers were also a major reason that Spyker, which owns Saab, ran away from Hawtai.

Data from the Public Safety Department (Police Department), which count the number of actual registrations of cars of a specific brand or model in China, show that Hawtai has been blatantly overstating its performance for years to an exorbitant degree.

Last year, only 15,950 new Hawtai cars were registered, according to the Police Department, while Hawtai claims sales of 81,435 units. Since 2008, the Department has recorded a total of 45,000 purchases of Hawtai new vehicles, only about 1/4 of what the company says it delivered in this period–183,000 units. Hawtai told CAAM that it sold about 3,000 units of the B11 sedan, which was released early this year, in the first four months of 2011, while an anonymous source at the company revealed that only about 200 B11s had so far been made and no more than 100 had been purchased by consumers.

On Thursday deputy GM of Hawtai’s sales department, Bo Yonghua, denied that his company had inflated sales numbers, saying that as Hawtai Headquarters in Beijing was just re-located, its sales database was currently unaccessible.

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