Austrian prosecutors accuse René Benko of embezzling tens of millions

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Vienna criminal prosecutors have accused René Benko of embezzling tens of millions of euros in the run-up to the collapse of his real estate empire in 2023, including potentially through the €46mn sale of an Italian luxury estate by his Signa group to a private foundation authorities say was in effect controlled by him.

Benko, who presided over a group that at its peak owned half of New York’s Chrysler Building, part of Selfridges in London and some of Germany’s biggest department stores, was arrested in Austria last month following a criminal investigation by prosecutors in Vienna, Munich and Berlin.

But Signa, which was built on €5bn of debt, started to disintegrate in late 2023 when one of its central companies, Signa Holding, filed for insolvency. Benko himself filed for personal insolvency last March.

Benko has been in pre-trial detention in Austria since January over alleged aggravated fraud, embezzlement and fraudulent bankruptcy.

Criminal prosecutors in Berlin and Munich are also investigating potential misconduct and Italian law enforcement agencies issued an arrest warrant last year over alleged suspicious payments to local officials.

In December, a lawyer for Benko said his client was confident that “any allegations against him can be clarified as substantively incorrect”.

According to a 38-page arrest warrant issued by Austrian prosecutors and seen by the Financial Times, Benko is accused of deceiving business partners to inject €35mn into the failing property holding company while simultaneously shifting cash and assets worth tens of millions of euros out of creditors’ reach — including furniture worth €8mn, a €90,000 Patek Philippe watch and expensive hunting rifles.

One of the contentious transactions identified by prosecutors is the sale of the luxury estate Villa Eden Gardone in Italy in 2023, originally owned by Signa Holding and sold in August 2023 for €46mn to a foundation officially controlled by Benko’s mother Ingeborg.

Instead of cash, prosecutors state that the mansion was paid for using shares in a Signa subsidiary that became worthless when the entity filed for insolvency three months later.

Prosecutors allege that the transaction was “artificial and economically implausible” as it swapped luxury real estate for an heavily devalued equity stake in a struggling company.

They claim the transaction was conducted haphazardly and the sale documents lacked a detailed description of the assets changing hands, normally standard procedure for such a complex deal.

Moreover, prosecutors allege that Benko called the shots at two family foundations — one notionally controlled by his mother Ingeborg, a retired nursery school teacher, and one by his daughter Laura — which were parties to a number of potentially suspicious transactions.

Prosecutors also raised concerns about a €2mn cash payment in 2023 Benko made to a person close to him: part of a series of payments between 2018 and 2023 that totalled €15.5mn, according to the arrest warrant.

They accuse Benko of concealing his ownership of furniture worth €8mn in an Innsbruck mansion and took issue with a payment of €360,000 in October 2023 to a legal entity that owned a property he used in Innsbruck, characterising it as an advance payment of rent for the next four years. Prosecutors claim that this payment lacked any “objective justification”.

At the same time as Benko was orchestrating the alleged asset stripping in 2023, he was allegedly also misleading investors about his financial health.

In mid-2023, when his own investment vehicle was down to a few thousand euros of cash in its bank account and according to the investigation in effect insolvent, Benko promised that he would personally contribute €35mn to a €350mn capital increase of Signa Holding, the arrest warrant states.

The prosecutors claim that he channelled investments by two of his business partners through multiple legal entities in his empire to mask the origin of the funds, and then misrepresented the money as his own contribution.

A lawyer for Benko did not respond to a request for comment. Vienna prosecutors declined to comment.