Early investors reportedly want to make money from Signa

At real estate giant Signa, events have recently come to a head. Founder René Benko will reportedly be forced to hand over leadership to renovator Arndt Goetz under pressure from his billionaire investors. “We don’t know yet how bad the situation will be,” Cigna investor Hans-Peter Hasselsteiner said in the Tyrolean Tageszeitung (TT) newspaper at the weekend. Without new money from all your fellow investors, nothing will happen. But early investors seem to want to get their money’s worth.

The German expert Goetz is supposed to come to the rescue, and Benko is no longer in charge of Cigna’s advisory board. Short-term debt is expected to reach €2 billion, of which €1.3 billion will be repaid this year. “Working to solve this problem is now the first task of restructuring officer Goetz,” Haselsteiner told the newspaper TT (Saturday edition).

It is unclear whether a withdrawal is possible

According to the newspaper “Welt am Sonntag”, important investors such as Roland Berger have already announced their desire to cash out. However, it is unclear whether this is financially possible.

It is difficult to assess from the outside the true financial position of the Signa Group. According to Ö1, this was also said by Leonard Dubosch, economist and scientific director of the employee-oriented Momentum Institute, who has been working with the group for a long time. However, the group may need new money quickly to maintain its business model, Dubosch explained.

Kleine Zeitung reports that the majority of Signa’s liabilities are bank debts and that the largest creditors are the Raiffeisen Group and the Bank of Austria. According to media reports, Signa Prime’s debts (including KaDeWe Berlin) are said to have reached 10.8 billion euros at the end of 2022. The result also turned significantly in the red, as after a profit of 700 million euros in 2021, the loss in 2022 amounted to 1.019 billion euros. . By 2022, it will not be possible to pay the obligations using our own resources, according to the newspaper. Without a €750 million capital increase, Cigna Prime was at risk of bankruptcy last year.