Ulrike Lerchbaumer

"In almost all reports about Haselsteiner, you can read that he came to the construction company Isola & Lerchbaumer – short: Ilbau – in Spittal an der Drau (Carinthia) in 1972 as a tax consultant and met his future wife there. The story sounds good, but it is not true. The truth is rather: He had already fallen in love with Ulrike “Ulli” Lerchbaumer, who comes from a dynasty of Carinthian construction entrepreneurs, during his studies. All male representatives of the family bore the first name Anton. Ulrike’s father was already the sixth Anton Lerchbaumer. The first had founded a craft business in the construction sector in 1835, which is why the founding year of Strabag SE is also given as 1835 in the English version of Wikipedia. In 1954, at the peak of the economic boom following the end of the Second World War, which was to go down in history as the economic miracle, the construction company Lerchbaumer became Ilbau through the entry of a new partner."

"Ulrike Lerchbaumer brought her then-boyfriend into the company in 1972, as he tells it: “I got to know my father-in-law through my future wife and then received an assignment from him in my bread-and-butter job – at that time as a revision assistant – to transform the company Isola & Lerchbaumer into a joint-stock company according to the Structural Improvement Act, as it was called at the time. This was important insofar as value-added tax was introduced on 1. 1. 1973. We carried out this restructuring retrospectively in September 1972. Then I was a member of the first supervisory board.”"