By Maren Wittge
After the burglary of a vault on Fasanenstrasse and the theft of 1,000 watches, the watch retailer Watchmaster has now filed for bankruptcy.
The company announced this in a press release on Wednesday. Accordingly, Watchmaster ICP GmbH filed for insolvency at the District Court of Berlin on Tuesday. According to the company, it is the largest retailer of certified second-hand luxury watches.
► The Watchmaster company had also rented vaults in the high-security vault facility in a former private bank in order to safely store its luxury watches there.
According to the information, some of the 1,000 stolen watches with a sales value of 10 million euros are owned by the company. A large part belong to customers who wanted to sell their watches through Watchmaster. A commission would have gone to the dealer.
According to Watchmaster, customers would not incur any damage because there is insurance cover. The watch dealer only gets back the purchase price, which would not cover what has already been invested in processing, certification and marketing.
The statement said: “Under these unexpected circumstances, it is no longer possible for the company to provide a positive going concern outlook. The incident is forcing us into bankruptcy.”
Unknown persons broke on 19.11. broke into this former private bank and broke into safe deposit boxes Photo: Timo Beurich
Watchmaster was founded in Berlin in 2015 and employs 75 people in Berlin, Paris and London. “We are deeply dismayed at the harsh consequences this incident has had for everyone involved. We would like to take this opportunity to thank our employees, who have always believed in our vision and have proven again in the last few days what they are made of,” says the company.
The burglary
According to the police, unknown persons broke into the vault in the basement around 8 p.m. on November 19, broke into numerous lockers and looted them. The perpetrators fled with the loot. Before that they are said to have tried to start a fire.
After the Charlottenburg watch coup, the Berlin police published photos of those they were looking for Photo: Police Berlin
According to information from the BZ, the spectacular coup was apparently planned well in advance. Security circles reported that the day before the break-in at the bank, the perpetrators had pretended to be new employees of a security company and had thus come into possession of the necessary security codes.
The police are now publicly looking for the perpetrators with images from a surveillance camera.