Customer Corner : Versatile – Rotten Core, Geopolitics, Backstabbing, and Cummins’ Gutless Profit Lust

By /

Versatile likes to sell itself as tough, reliable farm kit – the honest iron in a dishonest world. In reality it is chained to Buhler Industries like a dog to a post, dragged through every puddle of filth its owners step in. What started as a simple look at a tractor brand has turned into a pile-up: Russian control, political boot-licking, lawsuits from loyal partners, and a strategic backbone made of damp cardboard.

And crouched helpfully in the background, yanking the starter cord, is Cummins – the diesel despot whose own scandals make Versatile’s look like a pub brawl. The worst part? While Russia was tearing chunks out of Ukraine, Cummins kept itself bolted to this Russian-dominated customer and even found time to announce a new hydrogen engine collaboration with them. War, sanctions, geopolitical horror… and still the business hums.

Greed here isn’t just king. It’s God, Pope and Archbishop, waving a Cummins service manual.

The Russian Ownership Nightmare: Moscow’s Hand on a Canadian Throat

Buhler Industries – Versatile’s parent – didn’t just “attract foreign investment”. It got itself captured. In 2007, Russian combine maker Rostselmash bought a majority stake. Over the years that crept up until by 2021 they controlled around 97% of Buhler’s shares. That’s not a partnership. That’s a takeover.

Rostselmash isn’t some random overseas manufacturer. Its board has been stacked with Putin-friendly figures like Konstantin Babkin – head of the “Action Party of Russia”, a man who has publicly parroted Kremlin lines on Crimea and beyond, exactly the sort of cheerleader you don’t want anywhere near your industrial base when tanks start rolling west.

Then came 2014 and the theft of Crimea. Then 2022 and the full-scale invasion: cities smashed, civilians buried, Ukraine torn open. Canadian MPs such as James Bezan were openly calling out Rostselmash and its political fellow-travellers, urging sanctions on people backing the war while their Canadian asset, Buhler, clung to life.

Buhler’s response? Mealy-mouthed damage control. They stressed they hadn’t shipped machines to Russia since 2019. They issued a safe little statement “condemning” the invasion in February 2022 and announced Babkin had resigned from the board in March. The ownership structure, though, stayed poisoned. Versatile’s brand was now welded to a Russian-dominated parent, and however carefully they tip-toed around sanctions law, the optics were catastrophic.

Only at the end of 2023 did the Russians finally cash out, selling their stake to Turkish outfit ASKO Holding, the Basak tractor people. By 2025 Buhler is private, the stock delisted, and the “Buhler” name quietly buried. Transparency has been kicked down a well. Whatever flows of cash and control linked Rostselmash to Versatile over those war years are now locked behind private ownership and corporate PR.

This doesn’t look like a healthy clean break. It looks like a hurried scrub-down after years of happily playing host to a Kremlin-aligned owner while the world wasn’t paying attention.

And through all of this, the Cummins badge stayed on the bonnet.

The Australian Distributor Fiasco: Loyalty As Roadkill

As if geopolitical filth wasn’t enough, Buhler/Versatile managed to set fire to a twenty-year relationship with their own Australian distributor. That takes effort.

In September 2022, PFG Australia Pty Ltd slapped Buhler with a claim worth up to C$35 million. PFG had been Versatile’s distributor for two decades. They’d sunk serious money into facilities off the back of Buhler’s promises. Then Buhler slammed the export door on Versatile tractors outside North America and told PFG to enjoy the view.

The allegation? Bad faith, pure and simple. Orders taken, expectations built, then the factory yanked the rug to prioritise North American demand, leaving PFG stuck with empty lots and shattered credibility. It was betrayal by letterhead – the corporate version of ghosting a long-term partner by text.

By December 2022 the two sides announced a settlement. PFG was confirmed as exclusive distributor in Australia and New Zealand; each side ate its own costs. Nice and civil in the press release. But that doesn’t erase what it revealed about Versatile’s instincts: when things get tight, loyalty is the first thing under the tractor.

Farmers trust these machines with their livelihoods. Versatile, under Buhler’s stewardship, treated its own distributors like disposable assets. It’s not a one-off “miscommunication”. It’s a habit of burning relationships to keep the engine running a few more months.

The Iron Chain: Versatile and Cummins, Welded Together

Strip away the geopolitics and lawsuits, and one thing never changes: Versatile runs on Cummins. It has done since 1967.

Cummins engines have been the heart of Versatile’s big iron for over half a century. Heavy four-wheel-drive models, row-crop tractors – all built around Cummins lumps. In 2015 they celebrated a fifty-year partnership. In 2022, in the middle of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and while Versatile was still under Russian-dominated ownership, Cummins and Buhler proudly announced a new hydrogen engine collaboration: a 15-litre Cummins hydrogen internal combustion engine destined for Versatile tractors.

Read that again. March 2022, Cummins issues a statement saying it’s suspending its commercial operations in Russia – “horrified” by the war, complying with sanctions, the full solemn act. By August 2022, it is standing shoulder-to-shoulder with a company still effectively controlled from Rostov-on-Don to trumpet their joint hydrogen future. Different flag, same money.

Cummins did what the sanctions absolutely forced it to do in Russia itself. Then it kept the relationship alive with a Russian-dominated customer on the other side of the Atlantic, supplying engines and co-branding “transition” tech while Ukrainian cities burned.

Legal? Yes. Filthy? Also yes.

Cummins’ Own Stinking Record: The Perfect Match

If Versatile’s ownership history is a geopolitical sewer, Cummins is the perfect sludge to flow through it.

In late 2023 Cummins agreed to pay a record US$1.675 billion civil penalty under the Clean Air Act after US regulators said they installed defeat devices on hundreds of thousands of Ram diesel trucks. Software trickery. Lab-clean emissions during tests, dirty reality on the road. The whole thing looks and smells like a diesel-soaked version of Volkswagen’s Dieselgate – a years-long wheeze where profits took priority over lungs.

The settlement covers around 600,000 trucks to be recalled and repaired, plus extra penalties and mitigation for the excess pollution. It is, quite literally, record-breaking environmental wrongdoing. And yet there is no criminal trial, no CEO in handcuffs, no perp walk under fluorescent lights. Just a fine big enough to sting but not big enough to break.

This is the sort of outfit Versatile has chained itself to for decades. A company that talks “Destination Zero” in the morning and writes cheques for industrial-scale cheating in the afternoon. Together, they take “partnership” into a new dimension: geopolitically compromised tractors powered by legally compromised engines, sold into fields where the only people without a say are the ones who breathe the air.

War, Engines and a Spine Made of Jelly

Now we get to the part that really deserves the rage.

While Russia was tearing Ukraine apart, while sanctions lists lengthened and companies queued up to announce exits and divestments, Cummins took the loudest route possible on its direct Russian business – press release, horror, “we are suspending operations” on March 18, 2022 – then quietly carried on doing business with a Canadian manufacturer effectively owned by a Russian combine maker tied to pro-Kremlin politics.

TCAP has already called out Claas and Komatsu for chasing money through Russia-linked ventures while bodies piled up in Mariupol and Bucha. Versatile and Cummins slot right into that pattern. Claas harvesting on occupied soil, Komatsu kit working the same war economy, and Versatile tractors thumping away with Cummins engines while their ultimate owner sat in Rostselmash’s Kremlin-friendly boardrooms. Different logos. Same moral void.

Cummins can hide behind the legal line all it likes – “we complied with sanctions”, “we stopped direct business in Russia” – but this isn’t a fucking courtroom. It’s a question of whether you have even a flicker of moral instinct left. If you’re proud enough to blast out a press release on shutting down Russian plants, how do you then look at a long-term customer effectively controlled from Russia, still locking in new hydrogen engine partnerships mid-invasion, and think:

Yes. That’s fine. That fits our values slide.

They knew who owned Buhler. They knew who sat on Rostselmash’s board. They knew what Russian artillery was doing to Ukrainian cities. And they stayed bolted on until the ownership quietly flipped to Turkey. No public break. No visible line in the sand. Just engines, MOU signings, and the sound of money counting itself.

If that doesn’t make you furious, you’re not paying attention.

The Pattern: Versatile As Symptom, Cummins As Disease

Versatile on its own is bad enough – Russian-dominated ownership, distributors shafted, transparency shredded. But look at it as a Cummins customer and the picture sharpens.

You’ve got:

  • A Canadian manufacturer effectively controlled from Russia for years, with directors publicly supportive of Putin’s line.
  • A distributor in Australia tossed under the bus when the numbers stopped adding up.
  • A decades-long reliance on Cummins engines, reaffirmed in a hydrogen partnership months into a war the whole world could see.
  • A supplier, Cummins, with a fresh record-breaking environmental penalty under its belt for emissions cheating.

And all of it wrapped in “partnership” language, innovation spiel and “we’re horrified by war” boilerplate.

Versatile is not a rogue outlier. It is what you get when Cummins decides profit comes first, second and third and everything else is a press release. The same mindset that let them cheat on emissions tests is what lets them stay bolted to a Russian-entangled customer through a war and then quietly stroll on when the ownership changes.

Farmers deserve tractors that aren’t smeared in this shit. So do the communities breathing the exhaust and the Ukrainians burying their dead.

In the end, the most “versatile” thing in this whole story is Cummins’ conscience – bending, twisting, and disappearing entirely whenever there is money to be made and a fig leaf of legality to hide behind.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

Sources

Scroll to Top