After a good two years, the federal government left Lufthansa again – with a handsome profit.
The state economic stabilization fund (WSF) placed the remaining 74.4 million Lufthansa shares with international investors on Tuesday evening for a total of 455 million euros, the federal finance agency announced.
The WSF had saved the airline in the Corona crisis in 2020 with silent participations and a shareholding of 20 percent.
The Economic Stabilization Fund bought the shares in the summer of 2020 for EUR 2.56 each.
With the sale of the shares, the WSF earned a total of 1.07 billion euros.
The finance agency calculated that the bottom line was a profit of 760 million euros.
Lufthansa had already repaid the silent participations in autumn 2021.
Bold with interest in higher participation
"The participation of the WSF ends with this pleasing balance sheet and the company is back in private hands," said the outgoing head of the finance agency, Jutta Dönges, who is responsible for the WSF.
This completes the stabilization of Lufthansa.
The state is getting out earlier than it had set itself the goal: the WSF was actually not supposed to sell the remaining shares until autumn 2023.
Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs placed the last package of 6.2 percent at a price of EUR 6.11 per share.
That's 3.4 percent less than Tuesday's Xetra closing price of EUR 6.32.
At the end of July, the federal government had already reduced its stake to less than ten percent, since then it has apparently thrown more shares onto the market in smaller numbers and melted the stake.
Most recently, the largest Lufthansa shareholder, the entrepreneur Klaus-Michael Kühne, had expressed an interest in expanding his 15 percent stake.