The Hamburg shoe chain Görtz slipped into bankruptcy after the Corona crisis.
The company with 1,800 employees and around 160 branches in Germany filed a protective shield procedure for the parent company Ludwig Görtz GmbH on Tuesday, as well as insolvency procedures in self-administration for the branch and logistics subsidiary, as Görtz announced.
the district court of Hamburg appointed the well-known insolvency expert Sven-Holger Undritz from the law firm White & Case as trustee.
The company justified the insolvency with a significant drop in sales due to customer uncertainty as a result of increased energy costs and inflation.
"In order to adapt the cost structures to the changed market conditions", the decision was made to restructure via insolvency.
The traditional company Görtz, founded in 1875, had already suffered massively in the Corona pandemic and received a capital injection of 28 million euros from the Federal Economic Stabilization Fund (WSF) in 2021.
In the Corona year 2020, sales fell by more than 20 percent to 199 million euros, the loss totaled 36.3 million euros.
The Munich-based financial investor Afinum, who joined Görtz in 2014 as a savior with 40 percent, withdrew in autumn 2020.
The founding family holds the majority of the shares.
The management around Frank Revermann and Tobias Volgmann hopes to be able to preserve Görtz with a restructuring plan.
In insolvency, a company can more easily break away from leases, for example.
Business operations continue without restrictions, emphasized Görtz.
Until November, the Federal Employment Agency will advance the wages for the employees via the insolvency money, from December Görtz will have to pay them himself again.