Blender Benko – How the Financial Juggler Caught Billionaires

The Signa conglomerate is insolvent and its maker is bankrupt. René Benko’s personal bankruptcy as an entrepreneur also resulted in a personal “striptease”. Now he is dependent on his mother’s help and has only a meager fortune, reports the “TT”. The man, who received 26 million from Signa in 2019, currently wants to earn only 3,700 euros per month as an employee of two companies.

How could Benko build a castle in the sky of over a thousand companies with lofty promises? How could the salesman, who was trained at the dubious financial sales company AWD, sell the wealthy European nobility? How did he manage to serve this circle of billionaires with the legend of Europe’s most important real estate group, even at a time when the decline began? “Spiegel” investigates these questions and draws the “psychogram of a cheater”.

“A kind of brotherhood has been built”
Many years ago, Benko “always went for the most expensive and best” “when it was necessary to impress someone,” the magazine notes. “In 2014 he opened his five-star Park Hyatt hotel in Vienna, brought star chefs to his Chalet N am Arlberg, served fine red wine from Italy, sometimes for 4,000 euros per bottle. “You like to give your money to someone who is a winner,” says a leading real estate investor. “Benko built ‘a kind of brotherhood’ for himself.”

There were also offices in the noble Palais Harrach and a penthouse used for business in Berlin’s Upper West. “Two floors, about eight meters high. White marble tables, gold-colored floors, the enormous round bed under a ceiling-high canopy,” says the “Spiegel”. An insider who was a guest there about a year ago reports to the “Krone”: “Roughly estimated 2000 square meters. There were studios for bodyguards and separate wellness studios for guests. That was so crazy. So obscene. I then thought to myself: now he has lost touch with reality.”

“Feeling the greed of others”
Benko ‘felt the greed of others’, the ‘Spiegel’ quotes a former companion. When the real estate speculator “charms potential investors,” he likes to invite them onto his yacht for Nice, where he arrives by helicopter or private jet. If you are a passionate skier, Benko offers Chalet N, his private hotel in the Alps, which is open on request only. “Then there were the best ski instructors, the most beautiful rooms, the most expensive wine,” says someone who had this pleasure. Benko takes car baron Robert Peugeot on a hunting trip in Tyrol. He appreciates that and invests heavily.”

For a long time, the young Benko was treated to ‘the nouveau riche attitude’, an investor tells the magazine. He worked hard, was hungry and overzealous. “Big mouth. But great deals and quick understanding.” People could forgive him for sometimes overshooting his target: “Everything looked perfect.”

Act like hard workers
This is also because Benko managed to engage his high-profile investors such as Klaus Michael Kühne, who is considered the richest German with a private fortune of around 40 billion euros, Fressnapf founder Torsten Toeller or Robert Peugeot in one-on-one conversations to hold. until shortly before his demise with the shiny Signa numbers on his papers. “The men kept quiet because they knew each other. For example, when he joined Benko, logistics billionaire Kühne let him sleep peacefully because the car dynasty Peugeot had recently invested. When Toeller wanted to go out in annoyance, Kühne’s entrance stopped him,” says the “Spiegel”. Benko presented himself to his investors “as a hard worker who sits at his desk from four or five in the morning and stays well into sends emails and texts at night, often on weekends when he’s on vacation.”

In addition, according to research by ‘Krone’, there is the fact that Benko, according to a long-time insider, ‘had a private deal with almost every investor’: ‘Everyone thought they had a better deal than the neighbor next to them. .” And so they formed themselves only when doom was inevitable.

No crisis manager
What has Benko failed – apart from an obvious addiction to large masculinity? According to Spiegel, one investor stated that the number cruncher was not used to “managing crises” – he then reacted “emotionally to illogically” and needed a cool head. Benko’s condition seemed ‘bad’ to the lender months before the big crash; he seemed ‘desperate, alone’. And in the end it was ‘everyone’s fault’.

In the early 1990s, the mid-twenties looked very different in Vienna. In a borrowed red Ferrari and a Versace suit, he put on a big show for two real estate investors in the Millenium Tower, then the city’s tallest building (202 meters), built by entrepreneur Georg Stumpf, the magazine writes. Benko is said to have said: “Greetings. How much does the tower cost? I’ll buy it.”

Billion dollar offer from Stumpf
For twenty years, Benko apparently gets the bill for his arrogance. According to information from “Krone”, the group of successful tower builders Georg Stumpf recently made a bid for the Signa Prime package that has been put on the market (Goldenes Quartier, Park Hyatt, Constitutional Court, Kaufhaus Tirol). The size: one billion euros. According to reports, a response from the curator is still pending.