Daughter and widow at odds
Dispute over Thiele legacy continues
By Victoria Robertz
04/16/2023, 2:10 p.m
The legacy of the multi-billionaire and founder of Knorr- Bremse, Heinz Hermann Thiele, causes a lot of trouble. Even setting up a family foundation cannot end the dispute.
Heinz Hermann Thiele was one of the richest family entrepreneurs in Germany. His legacy is estimated at at least 15 billion euros. Over the decades he built up the braking systems manufacturer Knorr- Bremse into the world market leader, he owned the majority in the rail technology manufacturer Vossloh and held large shares in the Lufthansa Group. It was his wish to transfer the majority shares in the industrial companies to a foundation so that they could not be sold. But then Thiele died without there being a regulation for the planned foundation.
The attempt to found it has dragged on since Thiele’s death in February 2021. The foundation has now been recognized by the government of Upper Bavaria and can begin work. This brings more stability to the company. But the legal disputes in the family are not over yet.
At the heart of the inheritance dispute are Thiele’s daughter Julia Thiele-Schürhoff, her stepmother and Thiele’s second wife Nadia Thiele and the executor Robin Brühmüller, whose father was already a close confidante of Thiele. Brühmüller was Thiele’s tax advisor and was appointed by him to decide on his inheritance. Thiele also laid down the first principles for the foundation, including the fact that, in addition to Brühmüller, a family member and an external person from business should sit on the foundation’s board of directors.
Stephan Sturm, former Chief Financial Officer and CEO of the Fresenius Group, will now head the Management Board. Brühmüller also decided early on that daughter Julia should join the board as a family member. Brühmüller justified this with her greater entrepreneurial expertise compared to Thieles’ widow. Julia Thiele-Schürhoff is also a member of the Knorr- Bremse Supervisory Board and holds large shares in the company, which her father gave her while she was still alive.
“Just like my father”
With the founding of the family foundation, Julia Thiele-Schürhoff announced that the foundation had been set up “quite in the spirit of my father, the prerequisites for the continuation of his entrepreneurial life’s work”. She is now one of the most powerful industrialists in Germany, while widow Nadia Thiele gets nothing, at least from the foundation. According to “Business Insider”, she is said to have inherited real estate worth around one billion euros before it was founded, but as a so-called “pre-heiress” she is only allowed to dispose of it to a limited extent. So far, she has not been represented on the board or the advisory board of the foundation.
This is one of the reasons why she had tried to prevent the founding of the foundation in the planned form until the very end. With a lawsuit against the foundation supervisory authority, she wanted to prevent the submitted statutes of the foundation from being recognized. From the widow’s point of view, the now accepted version does not correspond to the will of her deceased husband. Above all, she criticizes the composition of the foundation’s advisory board, since from her point of view the people employed are not independent and are connected to the executor Brühmüller. The lawsuit is still pending at the Bavarian Administrative Court in Munich, and a decision is not expected until the end of the year.
Nadia Thiele also took personal action against Brühmüller in various legal ways. On the one hand, she wanted the probate court to remove him as executor of the will, but this initially failed and she has lodged an appeal. On the other hand, she initiated criminal investigations into fraud against him. However, these were discontinued by the public prosecutor’s office.
Another civil lawsuit is still pending, which is about Brühmüller’s allegedly disproportionate remuneration. In the will, Thiele writes that Brühmüller was paid “appropriately” for his office, which is usually 1.5 percent of the inheritance. In the case of the Thiele legacy, however, this means a fee of around 225 million euros. Nadia Thiele argues that the salaries of the top executives at Knorr- Bremse were just one to two million euros and that her husband could not have wanted such a high fee. The proceedings before the Munich Higher Regional Court are still ongoing.
Son contests settlement
A spokesman for Nadia Thiele told “Business Insider” that the widow’s lawyers “will lodge a complaint against the termination of the investigation with the Attorney General and will challenge the recognition decision of the District President of Upper Bavaria at the Munich Administrative Court”. All other lawsuits would stand. She is also still available for a mandate on the Board of Trustees.
A statement from the foundation states that the board of trustees is to be supplemented “by other experienced personalities”. According to “Handelsblatt”, this is understood in family circles as an open door for a possible agreement between daughter and stepmother. The “Süddeutsche Zeitung” also claims to have learned from those close to Nadia Thiele that the widow’s action against Brühmüller was not about enhancing her own legacy, since the foundation would also benefit.
Thiele’s son Henrik, who was supposed to join the Executive Board of Knorr- Bremse in 2015, is left out of all of this. However, after a dispute, the relationship between him and his father broke down and he left both the company and the family holding company. Instead of billions, he received a total of 25 million euros in a financial comparison in 2017. He has been trying to challenge this since his father’s death, but so far without success.