A total of 8.6 billion euros in claims have been registered in the insolvency proceedings of Signa Holding GmbH. The insolvency administrator of the real estate and trading holding company, Christof Stapf, announced this on Monday in Vienna. However, he said that he had initially only recognized around 80 million euros of the claims and rejected the large remainder. Rejected creditors can now try to secure part of the funds through a court decision.
Stapf spoke of an “inflating” of the claim amount. He referred to 5.1 billion euros in guarantees that the holding company had given, as well as a further 1.6 billion euros in liabilities within the Signa Group. Some of these sums will probably not be taken into account in the insolvency proceedings, it said.
The insolvency proceedings of the holding company and the most important sub-companies Signa Prime and Signa Development are made more difficult by the fact that the Austrian Signa founder René Benko built his group from an opaque network of hundreds of individual companies.
The Signa Group includes, among others, the also insolvent department store group Galeria Karstadt Kaufhof, the KaDeWe in Berlin and the Elbtower high-rise project in Hamburg. Signa had expanded significantly during the low interest rate phase. As interest rates, construction costs and energy prices rose, the group was plunged into a crisis. (dpa)