The reeling real estate group Adler does not come to rest: the German financial supervisory authority Bafin has found further deficiencies in the balance sheet of the subsidiary Adler Real Estate for 2019, as the authority reports. A total of three errors in accounting were found, it said. It’s another setback for the nested company, which has been in existential trouble for months.
As the supervisors have now determined, the German Adler subsidiary had wrongly consolidated the company Ado Properties, which also belongs to the group’s orbit, in its figures in 2019. “The consolidated balance sheet total was 3.9 billion euros and the overall result was 543 million euros too high,” said a Bafin statement on Thursday. As of the reporting date, Adler only indirectly owned 33.25 percent of the Ado shares. As a result, risks were also only inadequately presented.
It is not the first attack by the Bafin on the group headquartered in Luxembourg: In August, the auditors had already found errors in the evaluation of a central real estate project in Düsseldorf worth hundreds of millions of euros. The audit of the consolidated financial statements and the combined management report of the German Adler Real Estate for the years 2019, 2020 and 2021 is also ongoing. The Bafin, on the other hand, cannot examine the figures of the parent company – it is only responsible for companies based in Germany.
For its part, the Adler Group announced legal action against the Bafin and stated that it did not share the authority’s view. Nevertheless, Adler shares gave way: the papers were meanwhile listed with a minus of more than two percent at 1.60 euros. In March, an Adler share was worth EUR 14.70.
The trouble with the supervisor is not the only problem of the Adler management. The group is also still looking for an auditor for its next balance sheet. The auditors from KPMG had refused the company the attestation for the 2021 financial statements – and announced that they were no longer available for 2022. Adler has therefore been looking for a new examiner since the end of June, so far without success.