The liquidator wants to send parent company CPI Immobilien GmbH into insolvency. He also harbors suspicions of alleged malversation.
The bankruptcy of the Viennese real estate group CPI draws wide circles. According to the new managing director Hans Michael Pimperl, who specializes in the liquidation of ailing companies, the parent company CPI Immobilien GmbH will also be declared bankrupt in the next few days. “The application will definitely come the week after next, I still have to check a few details. I’ve only been managing director there for ten days,” says Pimperl to the KURIER. “I check all the receivables and what can be expected financially from the subsidiaries.” The parent company’s liabilities already amounted to around 273 million euros in the 2020 financial year and are likely to have increased further.
However, there is still no balance sheet for the past financial year. “But I can’t commission a balance sheet that I know in advance that I can’t pay for,” says the Neo-CPI boss. “I would be guilty of an offence. CPI Immobilien owns nothing. It only has accounts receivable and accounts payable, and both are of no value.”
According to Pimperl, both the bond and the participation certificate creditors should more or less look through their fingers. But even those investors who are directly involved in real estate companies are said to be left behind in some cases.
“Sometimes real estate was sold, the bank loans were paid, but not the creditors,” says the liquidator. Creditors mean investors.
Due to the lack of insight into the CPI business documents, the KURIER cannot verify whether the information provided by the processor is correct.
The former CPI boss Ernst Kreihsler, who died in April 2022, is said to have made all decisions himself and carried out transfers personally. In addition, he is said to have taken proceeds from home sales, according to Pimperl, “and transferred them to other companies where he just needed the money”. You could also call it the “hole-on-hole-to method”.
circular economy
“It’s like a pyramid scheme, as long as money comes in, it works,” claims Pimperl. “The investors paid in, when the next investors came, the old investors were paid out.” That is said to have worked until 2008. Then the banks should not have given so many loans. Kreishler is said to have had to pay more and more for the borrowed capital.
“He then paid seven percent, for example, but an apartment building in Vienna doesn’t generate that. That was a minus business,” says the neo-managing director. An apartment building in Vienna therefore only generates two or three percent per year. As a result, Kreihsler is said to have raised so-called mezzanine capital. This is a mixture of equity and debt capital, but it is not secured. “He then paid around 15 percent a year,” claims the liquidator.
At the end of 2021, the company undertaker Pimperl took over the ailing CPI company Dio Bau & Planungen GmbH, renamed it Hapag Bau & Planungen and led it to orderly insolvency.