Signa apparently already short of cash at the end of 2022
Published: Wednesday, Feb 21st 2024, 13:10
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The Signa real estate group was apparently already short of cash a year before its insolvency. At the end of 2022, the Management Board of Signa Prime and Signa Development AG sought to defer dividend payments to investors.
This is reported by the Austrian news magazine "News" in its current issue. Billionaire Klaus-Michael Kühne and the German RAG Foundation had rejected this and - like the Signa management team - still collected millions.
Specifically, the RAG-Stiftung, which manages many millions for the coal mining industry in the German Ruhr region, received a dividend of 11 million euros for its 5 percent stake in Signa Prime Selection AG on January 4, 2023. A few days earlier, it is said to have received 4.3 million euros for its approximately 3.8 percent stake in Signa Development.
Kühne Holding, which had doubled its extensive Signa investment just a few months earlier, received a profit distribution of EUR 16.5 million from Prime, according to "News".
The four-member Management Board of Signa Prime had treated themselves to total remuneration of around EUR 20 million for the catastrophic year 2022. In the previous year, the payments of the top managers amounted to only EUR 2.7 million, i.e. significantly less.
The 86-year-old Kühne is the majority owner of the Swiss logistics group Kühne+Nagel and holds a significant stake in the German Lufthansa and the transport logistics company Hapag-Lloyd. Through his Kühne Holding AG, based in Schindellegi SZ, he also holds a 10 percent stake in Signa Prime Selection AG, which was declared bankrupt at the end of December 2023.
Share packages increased
According to "News", confidential internal Signa calculations from the summer of 2023 are available, which not only show how much the investors paid out in dividends until not so long ago, but also how much the individual share packages cost.
At the end of December 2019, for example, Kühne Holding AG purchased around 3.2 million shares in Signa Prime Selection AG at a price of EUR 70 per share - a total of EUR 224 million. Further share purchases followed in May and July 2022. Kühne bought 1.596 million shares at EUR 88 per share. This amounted to a good EUR 140.45 million in each case, i.e. a total of just under EUR 281 million.
This means that Kühne has invested more than half a billion in Benko's Signa Prime through its holding company. In the summer of 2023, Kühne increased its stake in Prime, which specializes in luxury real estate, from 7.5 to 10 percent.
Other investors put off
The fact that Kühne Holding is the only company besides the German RAG-Stiftung to have received dividends from its investment for the 2021 financial year at the end of 2022 is explosive, writes "News".
All other investors were apparently put off during the Christmas period in 2022. Benko's management board had used the highly publicized second insolvency proceedings surrounding the German department store chain Galeria Karstadt Kaufhof (GKK) as justification.
©Keystone/SDA
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