Signa Group: Banking regulator examines Galeria Kaufhof risk

2023-07-07 19:00:23

Banking supervisors from the European Central Bank regularly approach large banks. On-site inspections, known in technical jargon as “Osi” for “on site”, have been carried out in recent years for IT and the derivatives business, for example. This year, however, according to information from the FAZ, there is an unusual, probably unprecedented Osi test: An international team of bank supervisors from the ECB, mainly made up of Austrians, checks European banks for just one selected borrower: the Signa holding company of the Tyrolean real estate entrepreneur René Benko . “It’s never happened before,” says a long-serving bank executive in Frankfurt, who doesn’t want to read his name in the newspaper. The ECB declined to comment when asked.

According to reports, all banks that have business relationships with Signa are included in the Osi check: state banks, special real estate banks, German and of course Austrian financial institutions. The bank supervisors should have known the amount of Benko loans per institute for a long time, even if the Signa empire is branched: under the Signa parent company (holding company), two-thirds of which belongs to the Benko family foundation, there are three separate companies, in one of them is also the department store chain Galeria Karstadt Kaufhof.