karstadtquelle Middlehoff’s magical mystery tour

Thomas Middelhoff has long wanted to clear KarstadtQuelle’s heavy debts so the German retailer could become - in his words - a «normal company» again. And he has now come up with a clever deal to shuffle the group’s debts off-balance sheet along with its property assets. Middlehoff has injected Karstadt’s E4.5bn property portfolio into a separate company which he has geared up to release about E3bn in cash. He has then sold 51% of the equity to Goldman Sachs for about E750m. This releases E3.7b...