According to the report, Benko is said to have spied on business partners at Signa

 

According to those around him, control was always important to René Benko. Even when business at the Signa Group was still going well, the Austrian real estate investor always had two or three bodyguards accompany him. Numerous cameras were installed around his villa in Igls, a village above Innsbruck. But that wasn’t everything. Even his own employees assumed that their actions were being monitored. Be it emails that they sent or documents that they wanted to print out in the office.

According to former Signa employees, when he prepared for meetings with investors, he carefully collected information about them. This also included private topics. This signaled interest and created trust: If the son had just started his studies at the last meeting, the next time Benko asked how the son was doing at the university.

Control madness turns into paranoia

From the end of 2022, business at Benkos Signa was no longer going so well. With Klaus-Michael Kühne, an important investor left the company – not yet noticed by the public at the time. The other shareholders in Signa Holding were also slowly becoming restless. Benko wanted to convince them of another capital increase, which they weren’t at all enthusiastic about. In November 2023, the house of cards collapsed and Signa had to file for bankruptcy.

The more the noose around Benko’s neck tightened, the less he was said to have trusted his fellow soldiers.

There was also speculation that Benko had the CVs of European Central Bank inspectors investigated. In the summer of 2023, they asked banks in Europe questions about their investments in Signa.

Important business partners were also presumably affected by control measures. One of them is Dieter Berninghaus, Benko’s Zurich-based chief trading strategist. This is shown by research by the two Austrian investigative journalists Sebastian Reinhart from the magazine “News” and Rainer Fleckl from the “Kronen Zeitung”. Benko is said to have spied on his most important advisor and his family for months.

The journalists have, among other things, a 39-page report that a private investigator prepared for Benko. The NZZ had insight into the paper. It contains detailed accounts of Berninghaus’ private assets, including his wife’s stock transactions – all information that is not readily available to the public. The private investigator confirmed to “News” and “Kronen Zeitung” that he had carried out investigations “on Mr. Berninghaus”. But he never met Benko himself.

When asked by the NZZ, Berninghaus was “shocked and stunned by the facts that came to light in the research”. He did not want to comment on possible legal action. First the facts would have to be analyzed. René Benko did not respond to a request from the NZZ.

There were signs that Berninghaus had become a target a year ago. In the fall of 2023, documents about the manager’s previous activities appeared in various media, putting him in a bad light.

A break in the dream team

For a long time, Benko and Berninghaus were a dream team: one was well versed in real estate, the other in the trading business. They had their first contacts when Berninghaus was still head of trading at Migros. In 2013, he helped Benko arrange the purchase of the German retail chain Karstadt.

After Berninghaus’ move from Migros to Signa in 2016, the two pursued lofty plans. Berninghaus built up the trading division within the Signa Group, which he also headed. In Switzerland, he orchestrated the takeover of Globus at Signa in 2020 and the purchase of the luxury department store Selfridges in the UK. They wanted to create the “largest luxury department store in the world,” as he said in an interview with “Bilanz” in 2022.

Pretty soon after moving to Benko, Berninghaus also invested in Signa himself. However, this was only known to those in the know.

The break between the two occurred after the Selfridges transaction at the beginning of 2022. Benko brought the Saudi sovereign wealth fund PIF on board without informing Berninghaus and the Thai joint venture partner Central Group. Berninghaus, who had a very good understanding with Central, felt betrayed because he knew Central would not appreciate it.

Berninghaus abruptly withdrew from the Signa Group in May 2023. He was suffering from a rare cancer that he had to have treated in California.