Overview: How banks have granted Signa a series of loans

A number of banks, especially in Germany, have granted loans to René Benko’s Signa group of companies. This is now becoming increasingly clear. This week the company holding company filed for bankruptcy. In this overview we see which banks were involved and to what extent. It is currently apparent that the major bank UniCredit is also involved with a large sum.

UniCredit invested 600 million euros in Signa

UniCredit has apparently extended loans worth around 600 million euros to companies from Austrian businessman René Benko’s Signa Group. According to informed circles, they were mainly awarded by its Vienna subsidiary Bank Austria, according to Bloomberg current. The loans went to individual Signa companies, not to the central Signa Holding, which filed for bankruptcy on Wednesday. They are all secured, according to people informed about the matter. A spokesman for UniCredit declined to comment.

The creditors of the real estate and trading empire include a long list of banks and insurance companies from German-speaking countries. The largest lenders known to date include the Austrian Raiffeisen Bank International, the Swiss bank Julius Baer, ​​Helaba and UniCredit. Many of the bank loans are secured by real estate.

Signa consists of hundreds of individual companies in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Luxembourg, which are connected to one another through a tangle of ownership and credit relationships. The insolvent holding company has liabilities of 5 billion euros, making it the largest insolvency in Austria’s post-war history. The two main real estate divisions — Signa Prime and Signa Development — had liabilities of more than 13 billion euros at the end of last year.

FMW/Bloomberg

Read and write comments, click here