Bank M.M. Warburg, which has been owner-managed for decades and announced a high annual loss for 2022 on Thursday, is to be restructured by 2024. According to information from the F.A.Z., the 81-year-old Christian Olearius, who owns around 40 percent of the bank, plans to take on new shareholders. Apparently, Olearius favors a "Hamburg solution", as he had already forged in 2008 with a bidding consortium led by logistics entrepreneur Klaus-Michael Kühne for the shipping company Hapag-Lloyd.
Hanno Mußler
Editor in business.
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However, Olearius' reputation in the Hanseatic city is different today. He will have to answer to the Bonn Regional Court from September. The Cologne public prosecutor's office charges him with 15 cases of particularly serious tax evasion between 2006 and the end of 2019, which Olearius is said to have committed together with other parties involved in-ex share transactions. Olearius and the second Warburg shareholder, Max Warburg, have already repaid almost all of the alleged tax damage of 280 million euros.
Banking supervision against family
Since 2022, the management of Warburg, which is considered a bank for entrepreneurs, has been in the hands of the two new and non-family board members Markus Bolder and Stephan Schrameier. Joachim Olearius, the son of main shareholder Christian, left Warburg Bank in 2021 at the insistence of the banking supervisory authority, as did his son-in-law Peter Rentrop-Schmid. And at the insistence of the supervisory authority, Christian Olearius must also have his shares in Warburg Bank managed by a trustee.
According to reports, Christian Olearius does not want to sell his shares. While Max Warburg has already passed on his bank shares extensively in his family, Olearius also needs a succession solution for his shares in the medium term. If a Hamburg consortium does not materialize, rich families could also join the Warburg Bank as additional owners, or a merger with another Hamburg bank, such as Berenberg or Donner & Reuschel, could be pursued by Olearius.
New management restructured
Meanwhile, the two new bank board members Bolder and Schrameier leave hardly a stone unturned at Warburg. They have sold the bank's shares in the fund company Warburg Invest to Bantleon, W&Z Fintech GmbH to Managing Director Nicholas Ziegert and Hypothekenbank to Münchener Hyp. Because the sales proceeds generated were lower than those previously recognized, special write-downs were incurred in 2022. After breaking even in the previous year, Warburg Bank posted a loss of €2022.34 million in 6. Bolder called this business result "certainly not satisfactory", but emphasized that all the burdens of the "strategy adjustment" had now already been taken into account.
Warburg Bank, for example, "essentially discontinued" proprietary trading at the end of 2022. At EUR 2022.2 million, profit in the securities trading business in 3 was only a third of the previous year. The number of full-time positions is to be reduced by 50 to 640 with the help of severance payments paid to employees who leave voluntarily. Two of the previous ten branches, Osnabrück and Braunschweig, will be closed. A new core banking system is expected to be in operation by 2026. According to reports, Warburg will use systems from Atruvia (formerly Fiducia-GAD), the data center of the Volks- und Raiffeisenbanken, for this purpose in the future.
Operationally, i.e. excluding the depreciation and amortization of sold investments and provisions for severance payments, for example, 2022 went better for Warburg than in 2021, it says. Net interest income jumped by 83 percent to almost 71 million euros thanks to higher interest rates. Net commission income, however, fell by 13 percent to around EUR 84 million. For 2023, the Management Board is planning for a "break-even result". In 2024, a significant profit is to be achieved, internally there is a target of 8 percent return on equity. By 2024, the corporate culture, which has so far been shaped by the long-dominant owners, is also to be further developed towards more project and personal responsibility. Both would certainly make it easier to find new owners.