L Catterton, the private equity firm backed by luxury French fashion house LVMH, is starting to pull ahead in the bidding for iconic German sandal maker Birkenstock, Bloomberg News reported. Birkenstock’s owners are currently focusing on negotiations with L Catterton as they prefer the investment firm’s track record buying and expanding family-backed consumer brands. They also see the potential to grow in Asia with L Catterton’s network in the region. L Catterton is competing with buyout firm CVC Capital Partners, which had approached Birkenstock earlier.
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Germany
German carrier Deutsche Lufthansa AG sold 1.6 billion-euros ($1.92 billion) of bonds on Thursday to partly repay a government bailout that kept it afloat after the pandemic severely disrupted international travel, Bloomberg News reported. Lufthansa will use 500 million euros to refinance financial liabilities due this year, and the rest of the funds will repay part of a 3 billion-euro loan from state development bank KfW, the company said in an emailed statement.
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Bayer AG struck a $2 billion deal to resolve future legal claims that its widely used weedkiller Roundup causes cancer, the German company said on Wednesday, Reuters reported. Bayer has been struggling to finalize the settlement of claims that Roundup and other glyphosate-based herbicides cause non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a type of cancer. Bayer inherited the business and the litigation as part of a $63 billion acquisition of Monsanto in 2018. The company has said that decades of studies have shown Roundup and glyphosate are safe for human use.
Commerzbank AG’s restructuring plan echoes that of its biggest rival Deutsche Bank AG, but without the latter’s debt-trading profit engine to pull it through, Bloomberg News reported. The Frankfurt-based lender said late Wednesday that it expects to post a loss of about 2.9 billion euros ($3.5 billion) for 2020, reflecting lower asset values and the cost of cutting about 10,000 jobs. The loss exceeds the 2.7 billion euros that analysts had estimated, and stands in contrast to Deutsche Bank’s announcement Thursday of its first annual profit since 2014.
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New passenger car registrations in Germany fell more than 30% in January to around 170,000 vehicles, an industry source told Reuters on Wednesday. Car dealerships have been hit by a second lockdown amid the coronavirus pandemic in Germany, with non-essential stores closed since mid-December, and by tax breaks for consumers running out at the end of 2020. New car registrations in December had been up by almost 10%.
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Fresh from toppling the head of Germany’s top financial regulator last week, lawmakers are turning their fire on finance minister Olaf Scholz and his deputy Joerg Kukies, Reuters reported. As their inquiry into the collapse of Wirecard gathers pace, it has put Germany’s biggest fraud centre stage in national elections in which Scholz wants to stand for chancellor. “The focus of the parliamentary inquiry will more and more shift to the role of Scholz and his ministry,” Florian Toncar, a lawmaker involved in the investigation said.
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German prosecutors are probing whether the leadership of Galeria Karstadt Kaufhof GmbH, Germany’s leading department store chain, took too long to file for insolvency as it struggled to survive the pandemic, Bloomberg News reported. Prosecutors in Essen started the probe in December after receiving a complaint from a private person, a spokeswoman for the office said. She said the investigation is in its early stages and the suspects have yet to be notified.
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Germany’s financial watchdog has reported one of its employees to state prosecutors on suspicion of insider trading linked to Wirecard, shortly before the payment firm’s spectacular collapse, Reuters reported. BaFin’s admission is a fresh indictment of Germany’s supervision of a company that began by processing payments for gambling and pornography before becoming a star of ‘fintech’ - financial technology - and finally Germany’s biggest fraud case.
The German economy will likely grow 3% this year despite the impact of COVID-19, Economy Minister Peter Altmaier said Wednesday, Politico reported. "The good news is that the upswing that has been observed since September and October 2020 will continue in 2021, albeit with less momentum than we had hoped," Altmaier said while presenting the government's Annual Economic Report, at a press conference in Berlin. "That means we have to do everything we can to sustain this upswing," he added.
Silverstone-based exhaust technology manufacturer Baumot UK has been placed into administration by its German parent company, the Business Desk reported. The firm has appointed Cowgill Holloway Business Recovery after the Baumot Group filed for insolvency after its core markets of the UK, Israel and Italy were affected by lockdown brought on by the Covid pandemic. The company’s UK arm specialised in fitting buses and other vehicles to with catalytic reduction systems to reduce tailpipe emissions.