Wolfgang Fürweger

"With the takeover, the company leader returned to operational business. He had withdrawn from this in 1994 when he was elected to parliament for the Liberal Forum. At that time, Erwin Soravia took his place as CEO. He now stepped back into a secondary role as deputy chief. His brother Karl Soravia became a new member of the Bau-Holding board, which was expanded from four to six members, and Haselsteiner also brought in Ernst Nußbaumer, the then head of Austrian Strabag. Erhard Grossnigg, an investor and turnaround specialist, became the new chairman of the Bau Holding’s supervisory board – a close friend and business partner of Haselsteiner, who will often appear in this book. Haselsteiner himself was elected to the top of the supervisory board of the German Strabag."

"At that time, the entry into Strabag was not the only strategic investment of the enterprising Russian investor: Almost simultaneously, he purchased 9.99 percent of the globally active German construction company Hochtief for almost 400 million euros. In September 2007, he acquired 20 percent of the so-called A-shares of the also globally active automotive supplier Magna International, which was still controlled by Frank Stronach at the time, for 1.4 billion dollars. Unlike Stronach’s B-shares, these had virtually no voting rights. The Russian was welcomed with open arms everywhere. In the case of Strabag, the investors welcomed the new major shareholder in their own way: The shares of the German Strabag reacted to the announcement of Deripaska’s entry with a price jump of more than five percent on the day of the announcement. Almost simultaneously, the company headquarters was able to announce that the just-ended financial year for Strabag SE had ended with a new record result. Of the 10.4 billion euros in annual sales, 40 percent were in Germany, 20 percent in Austria, 30 percent in Eastern Europe, and 10 percent in the remaining markets."

"When allegations of violence and abuse related to Catholic boarding schools surfaced starting in 2010, the federal boarding school in East Tyrol also made negative headlines. For decades, a regime of fear and violence had prevailed there, as Schmidl recalled: “If we talked after eight in the evening, the official bedtime, and the night shift caught us, we had to go out in pajamas into the cold hallway, stand or kneel and wait until he released us. The word of this ‘guardian’ had absolute power; potestas vitae necisque (power over life and death - ed.), we later learned in Latin class. We at least understood what that meant.”"

"At the start of the Great Depression in 1929, the company already employed 1,400 people. In the 1930s, the headquarters were then moved to Cologne. After the collapse of the Third Reich, Strabag’s headquarters remained in the Rhine metropolis, which at the time belonged to the British occupation zone. In 1949, the company went public. In 1963, the German Strabag founded an Austrian branch in the prosperous steel city of Linz. This branch was also listed on the Vienna Stock Exchange from 1986 onwards. Initially, Haselsteiner had set his sights on this Austrian Strabag because its parent company was considered a restructuring case: “There was not unwarranted hope that they were willing to part with their Austrian subsidiary,” Haselsteiner said at the time. However, this deal did not come to fruition, but the red-white-red construction magnate snatched up the parent company instead."