Monheim's mayor Daniel Zimmermann brought back a photo of Eintracht from his trip by train to Bremen.
However, that only shows him and a dozen municipal representatives in the sunshine of the Hanseatic city.
They all came to the first creditors' meeting in the insolvency proceedings of Greensill-Bank in Bremen on Tuesday.
Monheim had invested 38 million euros as a fixed deposit with Greensill. But the financial supervisory authority BaFin had closed the bank at the beginning of March, shortly afterwards the insolvency proceedings of the Bremen-based German subsidiary of the Australian supply chain financier Greensill began. Since then, it has been unclear how much the North Rhine-Westphalian city between Cologne and Düsseldorf will get back.
Private investors were compensated, but the state and municipalities as public investors have no longer been covered by the deposit protection fund since 2017.
For this reason, Zimmermann joined forces in May with 16 municipalities that had invested millions of euros there and were together legally represented in insolvency proceedings.
In addition to this agreement and the hope of seeing part of the investment again, Zimmermann also felt discord at the meeting.
Allegations against the banking association
His anger is directed against the banking association, which with the statutory and private deposit insurance had a three-quarters majority at the meeting. "The banking association has practically pushed our lawyer out of the creditors' committee," said Zimmermann. The representative of the Federal Employment Agency and the representative of the municipalities were elected from the creditors' committee by the banking association. Zimmermann no longer sees a single out of five representatives without a personal connection to the banking association. Obviously, one does not want to be looked at in the further proceedings. He points out that his municipal group is the third largest group of creditors after the statutory and private deposit insurance funds. He would have liked more transparency.
The banking association points out that the municipalities, as regional authorities, have one of the five representatives together with the federal states. Harald Noack is sitting there as a representative of the state of Thuringia, which had invested 50 million euros at Greensill. Apparently that is not enough for Zimmermann, also because the municipalities have invested several hundred million euros.
A spokesman for the banking association says that the creditors 'meeting will determine the creditors' committee as required by law.
The private banks had campaigned for all groups of creditors to be adequately represented in the committee: “In the insolvency proceedings, the statutory deposit protection is given priority.
All other funds are distributed proportionally to all other creditors.
The composition of the creditors' committee has no effect on this procedure. "
The liquidator has one goal
The private banks are the largest creditors with 3.1 billion euros, as they had to compensate many greensill depositors through their deposit insurance. Around one billion euros is preferred in the bankruptcy code, as it comes from the statutory compensation. The rest of the bankruptcy estate must be shared by the voluntary deposit insurance and the other creditors such as the local authorities. Insolvency administrator Michael Frege has set himself the goal of collecting up to 2 billion euros in the next five years.
As a result, Monheim's mayor hopes for a rate of 25 to 30 percent for all other creditors. That gives them courage, said Zimmermann: "And we will continue to use our role as creditors together with all other municipalities so that no things happen in the creditors' committee that run counter to our interests."