Lightning campaign for 60 million
Shortly after Christmas 2017, the former kika-Leiner flagship in Vienna-Mariahilf changed hands in a real lightning strike. Rene Benko negotiated personally at the time and was awarded the contract with his Laura Private Foundation for 60 million euros. With the support of – from today’s point of view – possibly short-sighted policy (ÖVP), which enabled immediate collateralisation in the land register and justified this later with “service-oriented administration”.
According to the Addendum research platform, which reopened the case in 2019, there is also said to have been a bidder who in 2017 would have been willing to put 90 million euros on the table of the then kika-Leiner owners. In retrospect, it also appears interesting that less than four months after the purchase, in April 2018, a lien of the Raiffeisenlandesbank Oberösterreich was entered in the land register for 95 million and financing in this amount was made available.