Shareholder merry-go-round at Austria’s conwert
It’s been a turbulent few months at Vienna-listed residential investor conwert Immobilien, and recent changes at the company are unlikely to be the last after this week’s annual general meeting. The company only recently rejected an offer by Deutsche Wohnen to be taken over, at a price of€11.50 per share, on the grounds that the offer price did not reflect the company’s true value.
The conwert share price has risen above that level since then, currently trading at about €12.35, but this will have as much to do with a new shareholding structure since the majority of shareholders rejected the Deutsche Wohnen offer. Major shareholder Hans Peter Haselsteiner, who was in favour of the merger with Deutsche Wohnen, has now sold his family’s stake of 24.79% to Mountain Peak Trading Ltd, a company whose beneficial owner is London-based Israeli billionaire Teddy Sagi.
Former Strabag boss Haselsteiner’s 21.2 million shares would have had a market value of €240m based on the company’s market cap of €973m, and Sagi now becomes the company’s largest single shareholder. Sagi is the founder of gambling company Playtech, owner of London’s Camden Market, which he floated in 2006. Camden Market Holdings, which owns Camden Market, Stables Market and Camden Lock Developments, was bought by Sagi in March 2014 for $664m. He has continued to buy property in the surrounding area.
Conwert’s Administrative Board also sacked previous CEO Clemens Schneider, who had opposed the Deutsche Wohnen takeover, with CFO taking over the top job on an interim basis.
New shareholder Sagi has wasted no time in issuing diktats for conwert’s future strategy. In a statement he urged more “value creation from its higher valued residential buildings through unit sales” and “resolute lease-up and reconstitution of conwert's commercial to create a more valuable commercial portfolio.” Sagi said the company “has to capture value uplift through targeting higher gains on sales over current market value, rather than increasing arithmetic NAV calculations through manipulation of valuations.”
Reports suggest that Sagi is keen to place Ben Lehrecke in as the new CEO of conwert, to replace Schneider. Lehrecke is the CEO of Vitus-Gruppe, which was absorbed last year by Deutsche Annington (now known as Vonovia). Sagi is also thought to want to replace supervisory board chair Kerstin Gelbermann and board member Alexander Tavakol with UK-based real estate veterans Barry Gilbertson and Maureen Harris.