Austrian real estate tycoon René Benko has been arrested and Vienna criminal prosecutors accuse him of making inaccurate statements in an attempt to misappropriate assets during the bankruptcy proceedings of the Signa estate he held.
Law enforcement authorities said Benko was arrested Thursday because he was considered a flight risk and prosecutors feared he might tamper with evidence. They also accused him of forging documents.
In an unrelated investigation, Italian police issued an arrest warrant for Benko in December, accusing him of misconduct at operations in the South Tyrol region. Vienna criminal prosecutors revealed on Thursday that they had formed a joint investigation team with prosecutors in Berlin and Munich to speed up cross-border investigations.
Benko's arrest comes more than a year after the collapse of his Signa Group, leaving insurance companies, banks and other investors in Austria and Germany facing billions of euros in losses.
Prosecutors said Benko was the ultimate beneficial owner of a family foundation in Innsbruck named after his daughter Laura. The Financial Times reported last year that a Signa Group company transferred more than €300 million to two entities controlled by the foundation before it went bankrupt.
Austrian prosecutors claimed that Benko failed to disclose his control of the entity, called the Laura Foundation, during personal bankruptcy proceedings.
"In doing so, he hid assets and excluded the wealth held in the foundation from law enforcement authorities, administrators and creditors," prosecutors said in a statement, noting that the investigation included phone surveillance. Evidence gathered during a months-long investigation.
Benko is also accused of falsifying evidence by issuing invoices retroactively to prevent authorities from gaining access to three valuable firearms, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors also accuse Benko of deceiving Signa shareholders into participating in the capital increase by pretending that his family foundation would also invest new funds, adding that he disguised payments from outside investors as his own by creating a complex chain of money transfers between different shareholders. Contribution. Different legal entities.
Benko is also accused of selling Villa Eden Gardone, a luxury villa on Lake Garda in Italy, to a Liechtenstein foundation in a sham deal that prosecutors said may have been embezzled.
He is also accused of defrauding a foreign sovereign wealth fund and convincing it to invest in a real estate project next to Munich's main train station. Most of the funds were then illegally used for other purposes, prosecutors added.
Benko's lawyers did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Financial Times.