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Paryalyzed – probably for the best. Also on Wednesday, investors and employees of the Baden-Baden finance company Grenke had to wait in vain for the announced “detailed response”. The company’s brief angry reaction the day before to the scandalous accusations of British fund manager Fraser Perring is not successful in the stock market.
Bernd Freytag
Rhein-Neckar-Saar business correspondent based in Mainz.
Daniel mohr
Economics editor at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
Although Grenke has rejected his accusations “in the strongest possible way,” the share price fell a further quarter. Since Perring made the accusations on Tuesday, the stock price has fallen 44 percent.
Whether the accusations find open ears also has to do with the sender. Perring and his analytics company “Viceroy Research” have made a name for themselves as “Wirecard hunters.” At the now-insolvent Munich payment service provider, they had warned about fraud from the start. Even the fact that Perring himself is openly betting on a fall in the share price and now he’s likely made a lot of money has done nothing to his credibility.
Bulky business model
In 64 closely printed pages, the investor lists a whole series of accusations. He accuses the company’s founder, Wolfgang Grenke, of later selling privately founded foreign companies to the company at excessive prices. This has inflated the balance sheet. In addition, the cash on hand in the Bundesbank, among others, is set too high, and the leasing business is not valuable. And in at least one case, the Grenke Bank made money laundering possible.
So far, Grenke has only specifically rejected the alleged lack of liquidity. This is demonstrably incorrect, it says in the statement. As reported, 849 million euros, or almost 80 percent of liquid funds, were in the Bundesbank accounts at mid-year. The credit is currently 761 million euros.
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In detail view
Grenke reserves the right to take legal action against the allegations. A spokeswoman for Grenke justified the slow reaction with the necessary thoroughness.
So far, Grenke has barely made headlines. Unlike the 69-year-old founder of the company, Wolfgang Grenke himself, who is a patron, financier of Baden-Badener Festspielhau, head of the supervisory board of the Karlsruhe Sports Club and president of the Chamber of Industry and Commerce of Baden-Württemberg, It is “his” company Grenke is hardly known to the general public. This is probably also due to the bulky business model. Grenke, formerly known as Grenke Leasing, offers businesses and the self-employed various financing models.
In addition to classic leasing, factoring is part of it; in this case, Grenke buys all the accounts receivable from customers at once, but at a discount. So customers get a little less money, but faster. The third pillar is traditional banking services, such as loans and investments, bundled together in the company’s own Grenke Bank. Wolfgang Grenke retired as Vice Chairman of the Supervisory Board in 2018. Since then, Antje Leminsky, who studied economics and previously worked for the auditing firm PwC, has led the board.
Wolfgang Grenke
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Image: dpa
Wolfgang Grenke and his family still control about 40 percent of the shares. Ernst-Moritz Lipp, a former member of the Dresdner Bank board of directors, has chaired the supervisory body for many years. As a professor of international finance at the Johannes-Goethe University in Frankfurt, he has the specialized expertise required for balance sheets. KPMG is currently verifying the figures; Earlier, EY was tasked with doing it for a long time, the auditing firm that has come under heavy criticism since the Wirecard scandal.
