Central savings bank of the municipality of Vienna
| Central Savings Bank of the Municipality of Vienna 1990: Central Savings Bank and Kommerzialbank Vienna 1991: Z-Länderbank Bank Austria AG |
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| Country |
 Austria
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| Seat | Vienna |
| legal form | Sparkasse, last stock corporation |
| founding | 1905, (start of operation: 1907) |
| resolution | 1991 |
| management | |
| Board |
René Alfons Haiden (Chairman) Gerhard Randa (Deputy Chairman) |
| Supervisory board |
Helmut Zilk (Chairman) Erich Meyringer (1st Deputy Chairman) Karl Dittrich (2nd Deputy Chairman) |
The Central Savings Bank of the Municipality of Vienna ( Central Savings Bank for short ) merged with the Länderbank to form Z-Länderbank Bank Austria AG (later Bank Austria ) in October 1991, with retroactive effect from January 1, 1991 .
history
On October 20, 1905 , the Vienna City Council , under the Christian Social Mayor Karl Lueger, decided to build the Central Savings Bank of the City of Vienna. It was founded according to the Savings Bank Act as an ownerless, self-owned savings bank similar to a foundation ; The City of Vienna assumed liability for the savings . According to the statutes, the city administration, through the mayor and other members of the supervisory board nominated by it, was the real determining factor of the financial institution and also one of its most important customers. The new Sparkasse competed with the First Austrian Spar-Casse, which had been operating in Vienna since 1819 .
The Zentralsparkasse started its business operations on January 2nd, 1907 in the old town hall and then set up permanently in the neighboring house 1., Wipplingerstraße 4. One of the founding purposes was the amalgamation of the Stadtsparkassen of the suburbs of Sechshaus (Sparkasse since 1881), Hernals (since 1890), Währing (since 1884) and Döbling (since 1883), which were incorporated into Vienna in 1890/1892, and Floridsdorf, which was incorporated in 1904/1905 (since 1881 ). After the incorporation, the savings banks continued to operate under the name Wiener Kommunalsparkasse in the ... district ; the merger with the Zentralsparkasse took place in 1923.
In the first year, 30,000 accounts with a total deposit of 14.7 million kroner were opened. With the First World War , the Zentralsparkasse experienced a setback, but at the beginning of the 1920s it took over smaller banks in Vienna. She was intensively involved in the financing of the investments in “Red Vienna”, controlled by Finance Councilor Hugo Breitner, in the years 1919–1934 and was usually given the opportunity to set up a branch for larger municipal buildings and urban settlements. For social democratic party members in Vienna it was almost natural to save at the Zentralsparkasse. Initially, the Zentralsparkasse was purely a savings bank, but in 1921 the business was expanded to include giro money transactions and later to securities trading .
During the Nazi era, the municipal savings banks of Mödling , Liesing (Sparkasse since 1897), Purkersdorf and Klosterneuburg were taken over in 1939 ; these cities were incorporated into Greater Vienna in autumn 1938 .
After 1945, the “Z”, as it was called in advertising and colloquially in its last decades, again became the house bank of the social democratic city administration of Vienna. Although officially ownerless, the Sparkasse was easily included in the SPÖ area of power.
She was an important financing expert in the reconstruction of Vienna and from the 1960s onwards in the clear improvement of the living standards of broad sections of the population. The institute, belittled by opponents as a “community savings bank”, often achieved better earnings than large banks thanks to its mass business.
Since 1965, the "Z" headquarters had been in a building that it had built in Vienna 3rd, Vordere Zollamtsstraße 13 , between the Wien River and the Wien Mitte train station - on the site of the Vienna City Theater, which was demolished in 1960 . In memory of the mascot “ Sparefroh ” there is a short side street called Sparefrohgasse to the right of the former savings bank building, which was sold in 2008.
The name of the house was changed in 1990 to Zentralsparkasse und Kommerzialbank Wien . In the same year René Alfons Haiden was appointed General Manager; he held office until 1995. With 120 branches in Vienna and 98 in the other federal states, the "Z" had the largest branch network of all Austrian credit institutions at the time.
After since May 1991 negotiations between the Central Savings Bank (Z), which counted as before for the savings bank sector of the Austrian credit institutions, and the weakening state Länderbank took place, the merger of the two banks by the owners on September 26, 1991, the merger agreement dated 4th September decided. Was in on October 5 Company register the Z-Länderbank Bank Austria AG entered. With retroactive effect from January 1, 1991, the previous Z and the Länderbank were merged on October 7th . The new Bank Austria (BA) now had 331 branches in Germany and 24 abroad with total assets of 515 billion schillings . The previous Sparkasse had transferred the operative business to this new company, in which it held shares through the share administration Zentralsparkasse (AVZ) . The AVZ was converted into a foundation in 2001.
In 1992 the savings banks Marchfeld and Steyr were incorporated, and in 1994 the Wiener Landes-Hypothekenbank was incorporated .
In 1994 the headquarters of Bank Austria was relocated to the Nordbahnhof area , 2., Lassallestraße 5.
The opponent of Bank Austria was Creditanstalt , which is under the conservative sphere of influence and partly state-owned , and has long been Austria's largest bank. When the state wanted to sell its CA shares in the 1990s, to the displeasure of many conservatives, the former Gemeindesparkasse came into play as a buyer: Bank Austria acquired from 1997 under General Director Gerhard Randa , who moved to the Supervisory Board in the same year , the Creditanstalt. A few years later, party-political assignments turned out to be irrelevant, and Bank Austria itself was bought up.
Today the AVZ Foundation is a shareholder of Unicredit AG in Rome and Milan. The Viennese opposition criticized the value of the stake in 2011, as the Unicredit share price fell sharply.
Details
The symbolic figure of the Zentralsparkasse has been the Sparefroh since 1955 , which became the symbol of the reconstruction in Austria after the State Treaty .
In the early 1960s, at the request of the City of Vienna, the “Z” financed the construction of the Danube Tower, which was built for the Vienna International Garden Show in 1964 . The tower was built by the Donauturm Aussichtsturm- und Restaurantbetriebsgesellschaft mbH, which operates it to this day. The Zentralsparkasse (in between Bank Austria , today Unicredit Bank Austria ) and 5 percent the former Schwechat Brewery , today Brau Union , held a 95 percent stake in this company . Their logos were long, visible from afar, in large format ( neon tubes ) on the mast of the 252 m high observation tower. The Schwechater logo on the lower part of the mast has meanwhile been removed without replacement, and a completely different company is now advertising in its place. With the changes in the company of the former Zentralsparkasse, however, the upper logo, the “Z”, was only replaced with the “red wave” of Bank Austria and currently with the logo of Unicredit.
An advertisement by the Zentralsparkasse on World Savings Day 1959 advertised in the Arbeiter-Zeitung with 41 branches in Vienna at the time.
The extensive estate of the graphic artist Heinz Traimer , who designed the advertisement for the Sparkasse for more than 30 years from 1952, gives a good insight into the history of the Zentralsparkasse.
literature
- Felix Czeike : Historisches Lexikon Wien , Volume 5, Kremayr & Scheriau, Vienna 1997, ISBN 3-218-00547-7 , pp. 698f.
- Andrea Hodoschek: AVZ Foundation: How won, so melted away. In: Kurier , January 22, 2012 ( online article , accessed July 24, 2019).
- Sparefroh has retired. In: Der Standard / APA , October 17, 2005 ( article online , accessed July 24, 2019).
- Agencies, and: Anniversary: When Länderbank, Z and CA became Bank Austria. In 1991 Zentralsparkasse and Länderbank merged to form Bank Austria, later Creditanstalt was added. In: Kurier, September 28, 2016 ( article online , accessed July 24, 2019).
- Anniversary: 25 years of Bank Austria - a chronology. The traditional institutions Länderbank, Zentralsparkasse and Creditanstalt became Bank Austria - part of Unicredit since 2005, without any Eastern European business from 2017. In: Der Standard / APA, September 28, 2016 ( article online , accessed July 24, 2019).
- Rudolf Bogensperger: A savings bank (not only) for the Viennese. The business policy of the Central Savings Bank of the Municipality of Vienna in the context of the development of the Austrian savings bank sector. (= Encyclopedia of Viennese Knowledge, Volume 26), Edition Seidengasse, Verlag Bibliothek der Provinz, Weitra 2016, ISBN 978-3-99028-613-5 .
Legal sources
- Decision of the Constitutional Court , VfGH KR1 / 92 of March 15, 1993 (= VfSlg. 13346).
- Perception report by the Court of Auditors on Bank Austria AG. Court of Auditors (Ed.), October 1997 (= III-100 der Beilagen XX. GP - Report - 01 main document (scanned original) (PDF) on Parliament's website ). In particular p. 7 (= PDF, p. 14), margin no. 1 and 2.
Web links
- Central Savings Bank of the Municipality of Vienna in the Vienna History Wiki of the City of Vienna
- Forty years of the Central Savings Bank of the City of Vienna. In: Historical town hall correspondence , January 2, 1947.
Individual evidence
- ^ Österreichische Länderbank in the Vienna History Wiki of the City of Vienna
- ↑ Bank Austria AG in the Vienna History Wiki of the City of Vienna
- ^ Sebastian Reiter: Criticism of Bank Austria's acquisitions. In: Wirtschaftsblatt . October 11, 1997, archived from the original on March 9, 2016 ; accessed on November 10, 2015 .
- ↑ Christian Höller: Dispute over the city of Vienna's “loss of billions”. In: The press . July 26, 2011, accessed April 10, 2015 .
- ↑ Central Savings Bank of the Municipality of Vienna: World Savings Day October 30th In: Arbeiter-Zeitung . Vienna October 30, 1959, p. 3 , bottom left ( berufer-zeitung.at - the open online archive - digitized).
- ^ Alsergrund: Memories of the "Zentralsparkasse". In: APA-OTS -Press release of the PID - Press and Information Service of the City of Vienna, October 9, 2017. (To: “110 Years Central Savings Bank of the Municipality of Vienna”, book presentation, lectures, poster show, gift show. )
- ↑ Cf. in VfGH KR1 / 92 of March 15, 1993 the guiding principle: “Responsibility of the Court of Auditors to review the management of Z-Länderbank Bank Austria AG as well as the former Zentralsparkasse und Kommerzialbank Wien AG and Österreichische Länderbank AG in the years 1988 to 1991 ; Control of the Zentralsparkasse (now share management-Z) by the municipality of Vienna through organizational measures (election of the members of the savings bank council by the municipal council, chairmanship of the mayor of Vienna, default liability of the municipality); More than 50 percent participation of the share management Z in the share capital of the Z-AG or the Z-Länderbank. "