Mr Kühne, in June you said that you would like to scale back your involvement with HSV.

But now you have offered to provide the club with 120 million euros and to increase your stake in HSV Fußball AG to around 40 percent.

How do you explain this change of heart?

John Knight

Correspondent for politics and economy in Switzerland.

  • Follow I follow

This is indeed contradictory.

But football is a very emotional thing.

When you have a favorite club, you can't get away from it for the rest of your life.

It is an attempt to create order and stability in the club - with a very small chance of success.

But because of the high income from my investments in Kuehne + Nagel and Hapag-Lloyd, the liquidity in my holding company is so great that I could make such amounts available to HSV.

Everyone in Hamburg loves HSV, but nobody wants to get involved financially.

I'm always the only one left.

Your offer is subject to conditions that HSV President Marcell Jansen believes cannot be met.

What do you think?

I got a lot of public opposition, but I'm used to that.

I have thick skin.

Internally, the top management didn't react that negatively;

she wants to talk to me.

But the club's management is always afraid of the fans, who don't want to allow outside influences and then go straight to the barricades.

Whether one finds a middle ground between these two extremes is completely open.

In return for fresh money, they demand more say.

But in the football world you don't come from the depths of space.

.

.

That's right.

I'm interested in having a say in the sense of advice, that is, that we talk together about how things can be improved.

You have to organize the club's finances in the right way.

And that's what the right people have to do.

There must be changes.

We need other people in management and on the board of directors.

I would prefer it if we found a neutral authority that would make the right choice there.

I don't want to decide that myself.

I'm far too far away from the football business for that.

They offer to continue the naming rights to the Volksparkstadion, to rename it "Uwe-Seeler-Stadion" and to pay up to 40 million euros for it over a period of ten years.

There shouldn't be any resistance to that, right?

I would like to do the many HSV fans a big favour.

The club is very interested in such an inflow for stadium financing.

But that is only available in a package with the other parts of my financial offer.

Was the financial commitment to HSV the worst deal you've ever done?

Yes of course.

That was a wrong decision par excellence;

Since the mouse bites from no thread.

Through your Kühne Holding, you are now Lufthansa's largest private shareholder with a stake of 15 percent.

What do you expect from this participation?

We had a high inflow of dividends from our stake in the shipping company Hapag-Lloyd.

It made sense to expand my holding company's portfolio in the logistics and transport sectors and to invest in aviation.

So my lobbyist Karl Gernandt contacted the federal government, which had invested in the airline during the rescue maneuver for Deutsche Lufthansa.

But Mr. Habeck and Mr. Lindner did not want to make a decision about selling the shares.

When the Lufthansa share price kept falling at the beginning of this year, we simply bought in via the stock exchange.

We were able to purchase a Lufthansa package at a very reasonable price.

We know the company: Kuehne + Nagel has been working closely with Lufthansa Cargo for a long time.