Central buys rest of German luxury retail business

Thai group will continue to run landmark stores and renegotiate rent agreements

FRANKFURT – The Thai retailer Central Group agreed to acquire the assets it has not already secured in KaDeWe Group, a chain of landmark department stores in Germany, part of the folded property empire of Austrian tycoon Rene Benko.

Central purchased the eponymous Berlin luxury department store KaDeWe in April, saying at the time that it would seek to also buy the two other stores of the portfolio: Alsterhaus in Hamburg and Oberpollinger in Munich.

Central would continue to run the stores and would now seek to renegotiate the rent agreements for the retail outlets, administrator Christian Graf Brockdorff said in a statement issued by KaDeWe Group, without disclosing financial terms.

Signa, the property empire founded by Benko, has been one of the biggest casualties of Europe’s real estate crisis, with creditors filing claims worth billions of euros.

The group’s holding company, which sits at the centre of a web of hundreds of firms, has declared insolvency, as have its two most important units, Signa Prime and Signa Development.

The purchase price for the iconic KaDeWe building was reported earlier by the German business daily Handelsblatt to be roughly 1 billion euros (38.9 billion baht).

The acquisition was a private investment of Central Group under Harng Central Department Store Ltd. Neither SET-listed Central Retail Plc nor Central Pattana Plc is involved in the transaction, Central Group said in a statement at the time.