Raid on real estate company: Berlin/Frankfurt (German news agency)

 Raid on real estate company: Berlin/Frankfurt (German news agency)

Berlin/Frankfurt (German news agency) – The public prosecutor's office in Frankfurt am Main and the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) have been searching 21 objects in connection with investigations into several managers of a listed real estate group since Wednesday morning. These include business premises, apartments and a law firm in Berlin, North Rhine-Westphalia (Düsseldorf, Cologne and Erftstadt) and in six foreign countries (Austria, the Netherlands, Portugal, Monaco, Luxembourg and Great Britain), as the Frankfurt public prosecutor announced.

Chief Public Prosecutor Nadja Niesen did not want to name the company because of "privacy protection". Around 175 officials from the public prosecutor's office and the BKA were involved in the measures. The accused are German, Austrian and English nationals between the ages of 38 and 66. They are accused of having incorrectly presented the company's balance sheets in their function as current or former board members of the Berlin-based real estate group in the period 2018 to 2020 or having provided assistance in this regard.

In addition, they are said to have concluded consultancy contracts on behalf of the company and instructed payments for these, for which there was no consideration according to the current status of the investigation, and thus caused the company a financial disadvantage. There is still a suspicion that the accused made offers of favors or bogus deals in order to drive up prices for projects and achieve a favorable "Loan to Value" (LTV) - this term stands for the relationship of the loan amount to the market or market value of a property, so it indicates how much credit you get based on the value of the property. This is said to have sent "wrong signals" to the capital market, since the LTV for shareholders and bondholders of the group is a key influencing factor for the investment decision and the market price, according to the public prosecutor.