Octav Botnar
Romanian businessman (1913–1998)
Octav Botnar (born Oswald Bundorf; October 21, 1913 – July 11, 1998) was a self-made businessman who founded Datsun UK (later Nissan UK) and its associated car retail business Automotive Financial Group (AFG). He was a noted philanthropist.
Early life
Botnar was born in Chernivtsi, which was then called Czernowitz and was in Austria-Hungary. During his childhood, in 1918, Austria-Hungary was dissolved and the city was renamed Cernăuți and became part of Romania. The city is now in Ukraine.
Between 1932 and 1936, he was imprisoned by the Romanian authorities for communist activities, and then he voluntarily enlisted to fight in the Spanish Civil War. After being turned down at the border, he moved to France, where he joined the Marching Regiments of Foreign Volunteers and then the French Resistance, and fought against the Nazis in World War II. He returned to Romania in 1946, where he worked at the Chamber of Commerce. In 1951, he married Marcela Perian, who gave birth the next year to their only child, Camelia.
In 1960, the Securitate removed the Jewish employees from the Ministry of Foreign Trade, allegedly for undermining the national economy. Botnar, who belonged to this group, was again imprisoned between 1961 and 1965.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Octav Botnar” is romanian businessman (1913–1998). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Octav, Botnar and Romanian, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2900838. VIAF identifies the subject as 5475155919102939730009. The Library of Congress control number is no2019073941. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1913, 1998, 1918 and 1932.
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This entry incorporates text from “Octav Botnar” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.