Private foundation goes bust

What’s behind Benko’s insolvency tsunami

According to reports, Benko has now even sold his yacht, the RoMa.

(Bild: MarineTraffic.com/Raphael Belly, Sepp Pail, Krone KREATIV)

On Wednesday evening, the "Krone" reported on the big Benko bang, which involved explosive shifts in assets within the Signa conglomerate - just a few weeks before the insolvency of Signa Holding. On Maundy Thursday, the next, very central domino fell in the deliberately convoluted realm of the financial juggler.

The Benko family private foundation, founded in 2001 by René Benko and his mother, had to file for bankruptcy at the Innsbruck regional court.

Hardly any liquid funds
This step came as little surprise: on the one hand, the foundation's bankruptcy was apparently also triggered by claims from various co-investors of the Signa Group, who had the contractual right to return their shares in the convoluted conglomerate to Benko. In total, this foundation holds 66 percent of the shares in Signa Holding (10.1 percent directly, 55.97 percent indirectly via subsidiaries with sometimes unwieldy names). 

On the other hand, this Benko foundation based in Innsbruck no longer had any significant liquid funds at its disposal at the end of 2022; the foundation itself had probably been over-indebted since the insolvency of Signa Holding and was therefore bankrupt.

According to confidential annual financial statements obtained by "Krone", the private Benko family foundation already had significantly more debts than assets as at December 31, 2022, if the value of the shares in Signa Holding is disregarded, which is practically zero due to the Signa insolvency tsunami: The foundation, which went bankrupt on Maundy Thursday, only had cash amounting to 640,953 euros in its accounts at the time; in the previous year (end of 2021), this had still amounted to 8.274 million euros.  

A telling detail in passing: René Benko himself had borrowed 21 million euros from his foundation; as is well known, he slipped into bankruptcy as a private entrepreneur.

Benko's assets, such as the private jet and the RoMa yacht, are held by the Laura Private Foundation.

(Bild: Birbaumer Christof)

Goodbye RoMa
According to reports, Signa founder Benko recently parted with a luxury property that had been inseparable from his supposedly successful career as an entrepreneur for many years: according to information from "Krone", a South African entrepreneur is believed to have taken over the 62-meter motor yacht RoMa. The reported purchase price: just under 25 million euros. However, the RoMa belonged to the empire of Benko's Laura Private Foundation, which is also based in Innsbruck.

The insolvency business
Meanwhile, the numerous insolvency administrators in the Signa conglomerate seem to be in a gold-rush mood: According to "Krone" research, the restructuring administrator of the core company named Signa Prime Selection AG alone is to collect around 22 million euros for his three months of clean-up work.