display
Engelbert Lütke Daldrup draws a premature end to his work as managing director of the Berlin Brandenburg airport company.
The operator of BER airport announced that he would like to give up his post in September - about six months before the actual contract expiry in March 2022.
With the completion and commissioning of BER and the submission of the new business plan 2021, it was said that he had fulfilled his task.
With the completion of the 65th year of life, it is time to pave the way for a new and qualified management team.
The supervisory board is likely to approve the early termination of the contract at its meeting on Friday.
With Lütke Daldrup's imminent farewell, a more than four-year unprecedented roller coaster ride for a managing director ends - followed by chaotic construction conditions, a not exactly benevolent public, past the restrained cheers for the opening of the new airport in October 2020 to the crashing Corona descent of all air traffic of a severe financial distress of the company.
Of the almost 35 million passengers at Berlin airports each year, not even ten million have stayed.
display
At BER, Lütke Daldrup achieved what, according to surveys, a majority of the German population had considered impossible in the summer of 2020: Under his leadership, the airport on the southeastern edge of the capital was completed and opened.
The BER construction was a project in which almost everyone involved made almost all the mistakes that are conceivable in a major project.
The chaos, caused by cost miscalculations, political guidelines, constant rescheduling and lack of control, made Germany a laughing stock for years.
Surprisingly, Lütke Daldrup was appointed managing director in a quick action in March 2017, at a time when nobody really knew how to restore order on the construction site.
He put everything in order
display
The studied spatial planner, City Councilor of Leipzig and State Secretary in Berlin and in the federal government initially collected all errors, reorganized the construction site management and put everything in a sequence.
For years it was about specially created construction standards for dowels, tests of the smoke extraction system and cable connections that made no sense.
It is simply tragic that the completion of the airport coincided with the collapse of air traffic.
"We have worked for years to put this construction disaster in order," said Lütke Daldrup in an interview with WELT AM SONNTAG in October.
"And now, when we start with BER, we are in the middle of the worst aviation crisis since the Second World War."
The material construction site became a financial construction site.
It had always been the plan that the airport company FBB, which is 37 percent owned by the states of Berlin and Brandenburg and 26 percent by the federal government, will gradually repay the building debts of more than three billion itself.
display
This should be ensured by higher airport charges, more shopping and growing air traffic.
It was foreseeable that this would no longer work and can hardly be attributed to the management or the airport.
The airport company has been making a loss of around one million euros a day since January.
In particular with the Greens in the Berlin House of Representatives and in the Bundestag, the management is repeatedly criticized for the alleged lack of transparency in finances.
But if a minus just keeps getting bigger, there is nothing more you can do than to proclaim it again and again - that's how Lütke Daldrup argues.
Initially, there was corona aid of 260 million euros from the shareholders last year, and a further 800 million euros in liquidity aid are planned for the coming years.
At the supervisory board meeting next Friday, a partial debt discharge of 1.1 billion euros is to be resolved by the shareholders.
Privatization is no longer an issue
The BER is and will remain a billion-dollar task for the state and taxpayers.
The alternative would be real bankruptcy.
But what good does a bankrupt airport that can no longer operate for the republic?
In any case, privatization is no longer on the agenda, according to company circles.
The proceeds would probably be small, and the state could still sit on the building debts, but would then no longer have an airport.
Lütke Daldrup always emphasized that the annual reports are transparent and are checked by several bodies: by the audit offices in Berlin, Brandenburg and the federal government, by three tax administrations and by auditors - including Ernst & Young (EY), which is also included in Wirecard -Scandal is involved and now presents itself particularly strictly, according to descriptions from corporate circles.
FBB cuts the costs wherever possible.
Terminal building 5, the former GDR Schönefeld Airport, was closed at the end of February, saving 25 million euros per year.
Short-time work and personnel savings: another 20 million.
Investments are being postponed, the entire “Master Plan 2040” is now obsolete.
BER Airport was once considered too small.
Now, financially, it is too big.
He sees light at the end of the corona tunnel, he says
display
"Due to Corona, we will have lost revenue of around 1.5 billion euros over the next five years," says Lütke Daldrup.
“We can partially compensate for these failures through savings and deferred investments, but not completely.
Therefore, the FBB has to come to a debt level that is sustainable in the long term, under the new conditions. "
“We would normally have been in the black in 2025,” he said in an interview with WELT AM SONNTAG.
Now it is only about saving the legal capacity.
"In the middle of the 2020s we want to be ready for the capital market again, so we want to finance ourselves from our own resources," said the manager in an interview with the "Berliner Morgenpost".
Nevertheless, "ELD", as employees and friends call them, also tries to give hope.
He sees light at the end of the corona tunnel, he said.
People would travel again in the future and want to see distant countries.
Lütke Daldrup completed the construction of the airport.
But the financial construction site will only be closed after his time.
Lütke Daldrup will be 65 years old in October.
He told the "Berliner Morgenpost": "I will certainly not be completely idle then, but no longer in such a role."
Here you can listen to our WELT podcasts
We use the player from the provider Podigee for our WELT podcasts.
We need your consent so that you can see the podcast player and interact with or display content from Podigee and other social networks.
Activate social networks
I consent to content from social networks being displayed to me.
This allows personal data to be transmitted to third-party providers.
This may require the storage of cookies on your device.
More information can be found here.
“Everything on stocks” is the daily stock market shot from the WELT business editorial team. Every morning from 7 a.m. with the financial journalists Moritz Seyffarth and Holger Zschäpitz. For stock market experts and beginners.
Subscribe to the podcast on
Spotify
,
Apple Podcast
,
Amazon Music
and
Deezer
.
Or directly via
RSS feed
.