“Very good investment” at the expense of 1900 employees and many creditors.
Innsbruck (OTS) – As with the German Galeria, René Benko’s commitment to Kika ends in a fiasco – at least for the others.
The five-year trip to the furniture store paid off for René Benko and his Signa, but not for everyone else. Benkos Signa says goodbye with a whopping plus, the detour into the Kika/Leiner Group is said to have brought in around 300 million euros on balance. A “very good investment”, as Signa found shortly before the mass terminations by the new owner. For 1900 of the remaining 3900 employees it has not paid off, they can look for a new job. The creditors will probably be left with a lot of money in the course of the insolvency.
The trade union calls it “cynical”, “vampire-like” the Tyrolean AK boss. And rightly so, when half the workforce is thrown out immediately after the lucrative sale and insolvency is announced. Or the other way around: you buy a furniture group knowing that the next day there will be massive job cuts and bankruptcy is imminent. In view of this chronology, some questions should still be clarified. As in Germany with Galeria Karstadt Kaufhof, Benkos Signa also leaves a heap of rubble at Kika/Leiner. Here and there, the Tyrolean was always courted by politicians. Germany transferred almost 700 million euros in tax money to the department store chain during Corona – most of it wasted in insolvency. In Austria, the turquoise-blue part of politics in particular ensnared the investor, even with Benko’s Kika/Leiner entry, ex-Chancellor Sebastian Kurz is said to have been involved.
You can roll up the red carpet again. Because in the end there are millions in profits on the one hand and human fate on the other. And those who call for wealth taxes for the super-rich will now feel vindicated.
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