For eight years, the container rental company P & R should have kept afloat only with a snowball system. This is the result of insights from insolvency administrator Michael Jaffé.
The bankruptcy petition that the company filed in the spring would actually have been due in 2010, Jaffé said at the first of a series of creditor meetings in the Olympiahalle in Munich.
Since then, P & R has financed the payments due to investors only with newly raised money. However, the investments had collapsed after the insolvency of its competitor Magellan in 2016 and 2017, so that the liquidity in March 2018 was used up.
P & R is one of the biggest investment scandals in Germany. The company, which had been successful for decades, eventually sold around 1.6 million shipping containers as an investment to 54,000 investors, of which one million did not exist.
Bankruptcy Trustee continues business
The gap had become bigger, according to Jaffé, since 2007. The insolvency administrator is trying to continue the business with the containers, which are leased from the Swiss train to shipping companies and leasing companies, and to sell or scrap the containers only bit by bit.
This would allow some of the assets to be secured for investors. Jaffé expects revenues of around 560 million euros by 2021 alone. Therefore, it was important not to let the P & R company in Switzerland slip into bankruptcy as well.
P & R had raised 3.5 billion euros among its investors. The Munich public prosecutor, who had P & R company founder Heinz R. taken in remand on suspicion of fraud in September, estimated the damage to 1.5 to two billion euros. The chance to get back money from R. or the insurers, Jaffé estimates little.
Jaffé hopes for payments from 2020
A large majority of investors are more than 70 years old, so Jaffé is pushing for rapid payments: "If we make progress on our multi-level coordinated recovery plan as planned, a first payment to creditors in 2020 will be possible."
The first of four creditor meetings of P & R companies in the Olympiahalle was attended by more than 2,500 victims, and another 7700 were sent by their lawyers. Alone, they had invested more than a billion euros in P & R. The press and the public were not admitted to the meeting, many investors wanted to remain anonymous. They confirmed Jaffé as insolvency administrator.