SAustrian businessman René Benko's bankrupt real estate company igna Prime receives urgently needed debt for liquidation. British asset manager Attestor lends €100 million. “This allows us to significantly stabilize the company's cash flow with the objective of structured exploitation of assets,” restructuring executive Norbert Abelin said in a statement on Good Friday.
“structured realization of assets” means the sale of liquidated assets; Thanks to the liquidity injection, the reorganizer does not have to resort to emergency sales to get cash quickly. Such emergency sales usually bring in little revenue, which reduces the provision for creditors. Real estate in Germany has been particularly affected. Prime Real Estate's director of restructuring, Erhard Krasnick, told the Austrian “Standard” that 65 of Prime's 110 properties are bankrupt and only one of them is not in Germany.
Cigna Prime's buildings include the Elbtower in Hamburg. Insolvency administrator Torsten Martini of the Görg law firm, which merged the insolvent Cigna companies in Germany, is handling the sale of Elbtower.
Creditors are demanding 12.8 billion euros so far
In the event of the bankruptcy of Cigna Prime in Austria, the entire assets are planned to be handed over to a trustee by current restructuring manager Abel. He must sell the property within five years. Creditors' claims registered so far amount to 12.8 billion euros. The insolvency administrator has so far approved only about €6 billion of this.
Sandor is well known in this country because the company is the majority owner of the airline Condor with 51 percent. The holiday airline was already in trouble before the coronavirus pandemic due to the bankruptcy of parent company Thomas Cook and was bailed out by the federal government and the state of Hesse with 550 million euros in debt during a booking slump in 2020. The central and state governments also hold the remaining stake in Condor.
Attestor was founded in 2021 by German Jan-Christoph Peters, and according to the latest filings, the company made £24 million in profits in 2022. The asset manager specializes in dealing with struggling companies. Adester was also part of a consortium with Volkswagen that took over car rental company Europcar. With loans now available from Cigna, the investor naturally gets attractive interest rates; Interest rates of 15 to 18 percent are common in such cases.
