There are some questions in this story that are not so easy to answer in hindsight. For example this one: Did the entrepreneur Heinz Hermann Thiele, who died two years ago, really want to pay his executor Robin Brühmüller a fee in the hundreds of millions? The old patriarch, of all people, who was considered rather stingy? Or does the story go differently, and at the center of this bizarre dispute over Thiele’s legacy is actually a tangible struggle for future power relations in the family foundation that has just been founded, with an executor of the will as the linchpin?
In any case, there are enough questions and secrets here to keep several Munich courts and even more lawyers busy with the Thiele inheritance. This is all the more remarkable because Thiele, who died at the age of 79 in February 2021, actually wanted to quietly secure his life’s work. Thiele wanted to “absolutely prevent a dispute after his death,” as a family confidant put it. Now things are going exactly the way he didn’t want them to. Pretty loud and not very discreet.
Thiele feared the sale of his life’s work to a US investor
After his death, he wanted his life’s work, which also includes the Vossloh railway technology company, to be in a family foundation. It is said that he feared that the company Knorr- Bremse, which he had turned into a world market leader in 50 years, could be sold to a US company. He is said to have written a draft for the foundation specifically for this purpose, but the foundation can only begin its work now, two years after his death. It’s about an estate of 15 billion euros, the protagonists fight their inheritance dispute on the open stage. In the center: The “Testament Zeus”. That’s what Thiele’s lawyers used to call it during his lifetime. Sounds kind of cryptic? It is.
Curtain up for the billion-dollar drama.
Those fighting in the front row in the Zeus tragedy are essentially Thiele’s widow Nadia, 47, and Thiele’s executor, Robin Brühmüller, 54. The protagonists don’t have much in common, only that: they want to get involved in the cause not express. Both play very different roles. Brühmüller is supposed to organize the estate of the patriarch and also set the foundation on track. The man was Thiele’s tax consultant and auditor for more than 20 years, and in 2015 Thiele finally gave him general power of attorney.
The executor should get a fee of 225 million euros
The one who gave him power is no longer there, and so this is where the widow Nadia Thiele comes into play. She thinks that Brühmüller’s salary is too high; the longtime Thiele intimate could collect 225 million euros for five years of work. Sounds like a lot of money, but this sum is based on a table by the German Association of Notaries, which stipulates remuneration of 1.5 percent of the value for assets of five million euros and more. According to reports, Thiele stipulated in his notarial will in 2018 that he still wanted to clarify the remuneration with his executor. Since there was never such an agreement between Thieles and Brühmüller, the table applies. So 225 million euros in five years.
Nadia Thiele’s lawyers from the Gauweiler law firm assume that the executor of the will left Thiele in the dark about his fee or even deceived him and that Thiele possibly did not even know the table of the notaries’ association. That’s why you want to depose Brühmüller. Since you can no longer ask Thiele, it now depends on other sources.
According to reports, Nadia Thiele will receive around one billion euros, mainly in the form of real estate – albeit with the status of a so-called “pre-heiress”. This means that she can only dispose of it with restrictions. She is not allowed to give it away or pass it on. In the event of her death, her inheritance will flow into the family foundation. The fact that she only wants to enhance her legacy with Brühmüller’s dismissal, as rumored, is not true, according to Nadia Thieles. Ultimately, only the foundation should benefit from this, after all, a three-digit million sum would flow in if Brühmüller’s high remuneration was off the table. So this tragedy is probably not just about money.
Allegations against the executor
Nadia Thiele also accuses the executor of thinking more about his own financial interests than the wishes of her deceased husband when building the family foundation. Because Brühmüller has now installed a foundation board in which he has appointed the long-time boss of the Fresenius Group, Stephan Sturm, as chairman in addition to himself and Thiele daughter Julia Thiele-Schürhoff, 51. He has also appointed a board of trustees with three people so far, which includes long-standing Knorr- Bremse CFO Lorenz Zwingmann, but not Nadia Thiele. At least so far, because Brühmüller wants to appoint two more members in the next few months.
At the beginning of 2022, her lawyers applied to the Munich probate court for Brühmüller’s dismissal because of the question of remuneration. Gauweiler consultant Thomas Fischer is said to have set out various facts in an almost 50-page report, which lead to an allegation of fraud and breach of trust. “Thiele’s frugality is almost allegorical,” says someone close to the family. Brühmüller’s opponents deduce that Thiele did not even know the table of the notaries’ association because the patriarch is said to have worked in a completely analogous manner. He had e-mails printed out for reading, internet research was not his thing. Others say: The table has been around longer than the internet!
So far, Nadia Thiele has not had a role in the foundation
Such contradictions give rise to speculation and insinuations. One goes like this: Brühmüller may have omitted detailed discussions in order to avoid a lower agreement. On the other hand, it can be heard that Thiele is said to have discussed his will with his lawyers point by point – Thiele did not react to the remuneration when he was made aware of the high sum. The submissions of the Gauweiler law firm were not crowned with success at the probate court either. As a fully qualified lawyer, Thiele knew very well what the consequences of his will would be.
Really? According to SZ information, the Bavarian Ministry of Justice, which is responsible for the final legal exams, should not have found any reference to Thiele’s state exam in its archive. A family confidant says that Thiele dropped out of law school because there were offspring in the family. The question remains to what extent this detail could still become relevant. The fact that he later headed the Knorr legal department may have contributed to the confusion. “To this day, his lawyers are still enthusiastic about what an accomplished legal expert he was,” he said.
The fact that Nadia Thiele was then rebuffed twice at the probate court does not bother her. She went to the Higher Regional Court to appeal the decision. She also made representations to the Munich I public prosecutor’s office in the summer of 2022, as confirmed there. Brühmüller is said to have left Thiele in the dark about his remuneration in order to collect the three-digit million sum, so the accusation. The public prosecutor’s office probably searched Brühmüller’s offices on their own. There is only one statement from him: “The allegations against Mr Brühmüller have no factual basis and are unfounded. They have also already been invalidated in court.” The public prosecutor’s office has also dropped the investigation.
Nadia Thiele therefore remained one thing above all: she ultimately wanted to prevent the construction of the foundation, for which there were at least seven drafts, and therefore filed an action for an injunction with the Munich Administrative Court. Brühmüller’s decision to bring Thiele’s daughter Julia Thiele-Schürhoff to the foundation’s board of directors is said to have been based on the fact that she is a lawyer and had already been entrusted with tasks at Knorr- Bremse by her father. She has worked in the Group since 2002, also as a department head, most recently as CEO of the Knorr- Bremse Global Care association and since 2016 as a member of the Supervisory Board. If Thiele had wanted to position his wife Nadia in the group, “then he would have had enough opportunities to do so,” the family said. Incidentally, a new estate administrator could only have acted within the framework provided for by Thiele’s will – which, according to the probate court, Brühmüller also did with the foundation structure.
And the daughter? Julia Thiele-Schürhoff is happy that the foundation has finally been set up. “The prerequisites for the continuation of his entrepreneurial life’s work have now been created in the spirit of my father,” she says. That leaves Thiele’s rejected son Henrik, who was supposed to join the Knorr- Bremse board of directors in 2015, but then broke up after a dispute with his father. He is currently trying to challenge a €25 million financial settlement reached in 2017. In the first instance he lost, also this: great drama.
Insiders believe that the ongoing dispute now seems like a storm in a teacup – an expensive storm, however, from which the lawyers in particular would make money. The question is: What would Heinz Herrmann Thiele actually say about this? The man who would rather manage his estate discreetly and quietly?