Arcadia Hotels

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Dortmund, Arcadia Hotel (2016)
Limburg, Arcadia Hotel (2013)
Suhl, congress hotel (2007)
Erfurt, Hotel am Dom (2017)
Erfurt, hotel hall (2017)

Arcadia Hotels & Resorts GmbH & Co KG was a hotel company based in Schenefeld . It belonged to the group of companies of the German real estate entrepreneur , project developer and hotel operator Reinhard Baumhögger (* 1946 in Wickrath ). Under the mismanagement of the owner convicted of bankruptcy, attempted tax evasion and false certification in 2011, among other things, it became insolvent in 2016 and was liquidated.

Arcadia was initially a Hamburg hotel company, registered in 2002. Of the 29 hotels with a total of 3353 rooms, eight were leased; the company had about 1,000 employees. In 2011 Baumhögger acquired the company. The Baumhögger Group had previously operated over 30 hotels and four senior citizens' residences with a total of 7,500 beds and employed over 1,000 people. Baumhögger moved the company headquarters from Kösterbergstrasse 44 in Hamburg-Blankenese to Osterbrooksweg 69-71 in Schenefeld .

Suhl

In 1996 HVT / Baumhögger took over the ruins of the Congress Hotel Suhl for 13.8 million euros and had the renovation funded by the Free State of Thuringia with 24 million euros. Of this, 4 million were wrongly disbursed, as a parliamentary committee of inquiry found in 2009. Baumhögger had stated the value of the property twice as high and changed invoices in his favor.

Erfurt

In 2001, Baumhögger was supposed to build a 5-star hotel in Erfurt-Brühl on a plot of land taken over by LEG Thuringia (then represented by Reinhold Stanitzek ) with the help of 24 million euros in public funding . However, 2003 had not yet begun, and the city council of Erfurt was planning instead a renovation of the historic Erfurt courtyard, which had been proposed in the 1990s . Even before the council's decision, Baumhögger threatened Prime Minister Bernhard Vogel in writing on March 20, 2003 that he would sue for damages amounting to millions, which is why Erfurt and Thuringia abandoned this plan. In October 2004 Baumhögger opened his 50th hotel with the Grandhotel am Dom (operator Accor / Pullman) with "serious defects" and without political involvement. Here, too, it was later determined that the state of Thuringia had paid too high subsidies; there was no trial due to the statute of limitations. In one part of the grand hotel, the Erfurt casino was housed from 2005-2014 , followed by a table dance bar .

Criminal proceedings

In 2002, when selling three hotels in Amberg , Landsberg and Limburg an der Lahn, Baumhögger faked invoices for more than 20 million euros and had the input tax reimbursed illegally. In the same year he liquidated other uneconomical objects by transferring them to a "professional company undertaker" in Marbella , which made the unsettled claims of the craftsmen, but also due taxes and duties, irrecoverable. Countless craftsmen were cheated, a Cologne electrician lost millions. In order to make the sale of the run-down hotels possible, Baumhögger lied to the notaries, as the later criminal proceedings showed.

At the time of the acquisition of Arcadia Hotels 2,011 procedures were running against Baumhögger already for bankruptcy in particularly severe cases , false certification , infidelity and attempted tax evasion . In 1999–2006, its 31 companies cut taxes by a total of 12.8 million euros. On September 9, 2011, Baumhögger was arrested during a trial in the Dortmund Regional Court with regard to the risk of escape and blackout. Baumhögger's 2 million villa in Hamburg-Blankenese was searched, and correspondence was found regarding the acquisition of a diplomatic passport for 300,000 euros, which would have made it possible to flee abroad. On October 27, 2011 Baumhögger was sentenced by the regional court to a prison term of three years and four months. Baumhögger suffered a heart attack during the trial and was released after just under three months of pre-trial detention for a bail of 500,000 euros.

insolvency

The group of companies got increasingly into difficulties. In the pursuit of "shrinking back to health" and taking over profitable hotels himself, Baumhögger sold eleven hotels, including houses in Amberg, Coburg , Wuppertal , Limburg an der Lahn and Günzburg to the Austrian company Vienna International Hotelmanagement , and five more in Heppenheim , Gerlingen , Leipzig , Dresden and Magdeburg to various buyers. Arcadia still had 15 hotels in Germany, nine of which were owned by the company. Baumhögger also canceled the lease for his hotel in Schweinfurt, Franconia . Strange scenes emerged: he stormed the house with security guards, gave the manager five minutes to “pack his things”, exchanged locks and disposed of hotel flags, towels and soaps with the Accor logo. The leaseholder, the world's largest hotel group Accor , obtained an injunction. Baumhögger had to vacate the hotel again and also lost the subsequent civil case. In 2015, he finally agreed with Accor to end the leasing of this and two other Pullman hotels.

In April 2016, a business partner ( Europa Parkhotel Verwaltungs-GmbH ) filed for insolvency proceedings against Arcadia Hotels & Resort GmbH & Co. KG at the Hamburg District Court. The company was liquidated on June 8, 2016. The Arcadia Hotels in Bielefeld, Bottrop, Dortmund, Düsseldorf, Erfurt, Flensburg, Hanover, Heidelberg, Munich and Schweinfurt were bought by HR Group Berlin in 2016 . The hotel in Berlin came to the Deutsche Immobiliengruppe . The Arcadia Hotel at the Congress Centrum Suhl was foreclosed in March 2017. The building, in which Baumhögger had invested ten million euros and the Free State of Thuringia almost 24 million euros, was valued at two million euros and earned 3.5 million euros.

Sources, chronologically

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hamburg District Court, HRB 112490 of December 11, 2002
  2. ↑ General hotel and catering newspaper, February 2011
  3. ↑ a b c d e f Focus , Christoph Elflein, Tanja Treser: The Imaginary Consul , Focus Magazin No. 44, Munich October 31, 2011.
  4. ↑ Pinneberg Local Court, HRA 6483 PI of September 22, 2011
  5. ↑ a b Thuringian State Parliament , 4th electoral period, printed matter 4/5470, 4/5306, 4/454 and 4/431: Report of the investigative committee 4/1 “Hotel funding, possible misuse of public funds and alleged inadmissible subsidization by the Free State of Thuringia Construction of the congress hotel in Suhl and the cathedral hotel in Erfurt and its operation ” , August 21, 2009.
  6. ^ General hotel and gastronomy newspaper, October 2004
  7. ↑ a b DERWESTEN.de: Katrin Melliwa: Baumhögger has to go to prison , Funke Mediengruppe, Essen, October 28, 2011.
  8. ↑ General hotel and catering newspaper, September 2011
  9. ↑ Tophotel - The magazine of the hotel industry, November 2015
  10. ↑ Main-Post, October 2016
  11. ↑ General hotel and catering newspaper, June 2016
  12. ↑ Pinneberg District Court, file number: HRA 6483 PI, announced on June 9, 2016
  13. ↑ General Hotel & Gastronomy Newspaper 2016
  14. ↑ Free Word Suhl 2017