Actually, they wanted to take their time with Vonovia. The 250 million euro loan was to run for 18 months, only then did the Dax group want to decide how to continue with the much smaller and badly battered rival Adler. But now everything is going much faster: Vonovia is taking over 20.5 percent of the Adler Group from the previous largest shareholder, the investment company Aggregate of the Austrian investor Günther Walcher. The group announced this on Tuesday before the start of the stock exchange. The background is that Aggregate did not pay an agreed security in cash.
The cartel office still has to approve the deal – if it gets the green light, Vonovia will suddenly become the largest shareholder in the S-Dax group with around 40,000 apartments. The Adler share reacted to this on Tuesday morning with a jump in price: In an environment burdened by the Ukraine crisis, they rose by more than 5.5 percent to a good eleven euros. The Vonovia share also rose slightly against the trend.
And it’s quite possible that the 20 percent share isn’t over yet. Shortly after Vonovia granted the loan, CEO Rolf Buch made it clear: “We will not just buy a few Adler shares,” he told analysts in early November. “If we take the option, we will try to get Adler under control.” After the takeover of Deutsche Wohnen, it would be the second major acquisition for Vonovia within a few months. On Tuesday, however, it was only said that Vonovia reserved all options for action, “including a complete or partial sale of the shares”.
Serious allegations against Adler
What happens next should also depend on what two ongoing investigations at Adler reveal: one by the financial regulator Bafin, the other by the auditors from KPMG. Adler has been under a lot of pressure since the notorious short seller and speculator Fraser Perring made serious allegations against the company in the fall: Adler’s management, according to his accusation, had inflated the balance sheet of the nested group, and was also out of money protected by the confusing construct acquired companies have been deducted. Adler vehemently disagreed and commissioned KPMG to carry out an external audit. However, it is unclear when this will end. As a precautionary measure, Adler had therefore postponed the presentation of the annual balance sheet, which was planned for the end of March, indefinitely – and thus caused the share to fall to a record low.
As soon as the report is ready, the results will “of course” be published, the new head of the Adler board of directors, Stefan Kirsten, announced last week. How he and his new major shareholder understand each other should now be interesting. After all, you know each other: Kirsten, 61, was CFO under Buch for many years and together with him formed the Dax group Vonovia from what was then Deutsche Annington. Kirsten then left in 2018, at his own request, as it was called at the time. Later, however, reports also circulated that the relationship between the two was difficult: Buch pushed Kirsten out, it was said that he had become too self-confident.