The German state is withdrawing further from Lufthansa. The Federal Finance Agency announced today in Frankfurt that the Economic Stabilization Fund (WSF) has reduced its stake to less than ten percent. The state share had previously been around 14.1 percent. A few weeks ago, the Hamburg billionaire Klaus-Michael Kühne pushed the state into second place as the previous largest Lufthansa shareholder.
State at Lufthansa on the home stretch
The economic stabilization fund has now "turned onto the home straight to end the stabilization measure in favor of Lufthansa," said the managing director of the finance agency, Jutta Dönges. The WSF will exit completely by October 2023 at the latest.
After the business slump in the Corona crisis in June 2021, the federal government saved Lufthansa from going under with financial aid of up to six billion euros. The WSF initially took a stake of around 20 percent in Lufthansa for 300 million euros. Lufthansa has already repaid the other financial aid such as loans and silent participations.
Positive balance of the Lufthansa share deal
For the most recent block of shares sold alone, the WSF is likely to have pocketed more than 300 million euros. The papers are worth more than twice as much as when he joined. The proceeds from the sale already exceeded the sum that the state had taken in hand, said Dönges, head of the finance agency, with satisfaction.
The financial crisis had already shown that state holdings can be a very worthwhile business for the state and thus for the taxpayer. For example, the US government took a stake in some US banks after the Lehman crash and sold the shares later, when the papers of the money houses had risen again on the stock exchanges, with a whopping profit of seven billion dollars.
What will the entry into Uniper bring?
It remains to be seen whether the German state can now hope for a similar pattern with its most recent share deal. The federal government launched a billion-euro rescue package for Uniper last week and announced, among other things, that it would take a 30 percent stake in the troubled energy company.
Beyond Lufthansa and Uniper, the German state is currently still involved in the travel group TUI, the biotech company Curevac and Commerzbank. Here, too, there is still no summary of the extent to which the entry was financially worthwhile for the German taxpayer.
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