manager magazin

"Klaus-Michael Kühne led the forwarding company Kühne & Nagel to global recognition. He holds large stakes in the Hamburg shipping company Hapag-Lloyd and the German airline Lufthansa. Thus, he has become the richest man in Germany. However, two investments have only brought him losses, both financially and emotionally. His hometown club, Hamburger Sportverein (HSV), just won't manage to get promoted to the 1st Bundesliga, despite several injections of funds from Kühne over the past years. And then there is René Benko's Signa, in which he has invested even more. More than 500 million Euros from his family foundation are tied up in the company, as he spoke to two editors of manager magazin at the beginning of the year 2023."

"The CFO of Signa, Manuel Pirolt, was largely to confirm this assessment in June 2024: "It is true that one or two potential investors failed because of the legal complexity, although they might have found Signa real estate exciting," Pirolt said in an interview with manager magazin. "The structure of Signa was of course designed to achieve the best possible return in normal operation and not for the quickest possible transparency in an emergency." The basis of Signa's success, the steep revaluations of properties and the barely transparent structures, thus ultimately led to its failure. When it mattered, the emperor was naked. And everyone could see it."