Benko Flagships – Most valuable Signa companies have to file for bankruptcy

The Signa Prime Selection has put in its name in a marketing-friendly way what it was supposed to represent in the Benko corporate structure: the crème de la crème of Signa real estate as the largest Signa company in this field. But this shiny company is now also bankrupt.

The most important thing is luxury
The Prime Selection includes, for example, the Golden Quarter with the luxury hotel Park Hyatt, the Kunstforum and the future luxury department store Lamarr in Vienna, which is currently a shell.

The “Gross Asset Value”, i.e. the sum of the real estate values, was last mentioned on the homepage as 20.4 billion euros. However, the media spoke of properties that were sometimes significantly overvalued, for example in Berlin, near the Upper West. In addition to the dormant Lamarr construction site in Vienna, for example, the construction of the Elbtower skyscraper in Hamburg is also at a standstill.

Focus according to the company: investing and long-term ownership of exceptional properties in the best inner-city locations. Since 2010, the company has developed into one of the largest real estate companies in Europe. Now came the bankruptcy, in which the continuation had to be successful through restructuring.

Renovator Erhard Grossnigg recently became board spokesperson. His predecessor Timo Herzberg was immediately dismissed as CEO, which he had also been at the second particularly large Signa real estate company, Development Selection. The chairman of the supervisory boards of both companies is former chancellor and SPÖ leader Alfred Gusenbauer. His deputy is the ex-managing director of Casinos Austria, Karl Stoss.

What happens to swank properties?
Herzeige projects can also be found in German metropolises such as Düsseldorf (Carsch-Haus), Munich (Karstadt am Bahnhofplatz, Oberpollinger, Alte Akademie), Hamburg (Elbtower, Kaufmannshaus, Alster-Arkaden, Gänsemarktpassage) and Berlin (KaDeWe, Upper West, Karstadt Hermannplatz, P1). In smaller cities such as Innsbruck and Bolzano, the Tirol department store and the Museumsquartier am Virgl are among the firsts.

In Vienna, the Austria Campus near the Nordbahnviertel is also part of the Prime Selection. According to “trend”, the Meinl house on Graben was recently sold to the welfare fund of the Vienna Medical Association for an alleged amount of 80 million euros. The Postal Savings Bank is also part of the Benko glossy empire that is currently languishing in insolvency.

Nested ownership structure
The entire ownership structure is very complex – eleven companies with different owners, including several international billionaires – and the Benko Family Private Foundation plays an important role. Co-shareholder Signa Holding owns almost 20 percent and will be restructured as part of the insolvency proceedings that have already been opened.

According to Wirtschafts-Compass, the calculated ultimate beneficiaries are ultimately Ingeborg Benko, Rene Benko, TPA auditor and tax advisor Karin Fuhrmann and Marcus Mühlberg. The latter, together with Christoph Stadlhuber, is director of Signa Holding, which went bankrupt at the end of November.

Media reports show that the Signa Group has invested a lot of energy in recent years in avoiding an obligation to consolidate the entire group. The company deliberately designed corporate law within the group in such a way that there was no legal obligation to consolidate; the support came from law firm TPA, according to documents that ‘News’ recently published.

Most recently (2022) the figures were already deep red, the EGT was negative at approximately 1.2 billion euros. The number of employees in the Prime Group was 313, compared to 467 in 2021, according to the Economic Compass.