Imfarr, the Austrian private family office of Nemat Farrokhnia, has filed for insolvency at the Vienna Commercial Court, revealing some €604 mln of liabilities.
The Vienna-headquartered firm, founded in 2007, currently has around 110 creditors and 18 employees. It owns stakes in some 44 businesses and is the landlord of assets in Austria and Germany.
Over the past five years, Imfarr made a name for itself as it ammassed trophy assets in German cities. Alongside Norbert Ketterer’s Swiss investment group SN Beteiligungen Holding, Imfarr acquired Frankfurt’s 52,000 m2 Silver Tower for circa €630 mln; the 86,000 m2 Highlight Towers in Munich, for €690 mln; and the 67,700 m2 Elementum, also in Munich, for about €500 mln.
The latter was to be redeveloped, and construction next to Munich’s central station got under way. Last year, they lost control of all three to opportunistic US investor Oaktree Capital Management, which was the mezzanine lender on the investments.
Imfarr also acquired the Nestlé Campus in Frankfurt and developer Development Partner on its buying spree. SN acted as co-investor on these transactions as well. While Development Partner filed for insolvency in August 2023, work on a city quarter in Leipzig also stalled. Imfarr still owns several buildings in Vienna, notably properties on the centrally located Lassallestrasse.
Imfarr has said it was a victim of recent economic and geopolitical headwinds, noting that it is not the only investor or developer in the region to have hit the skids. Cevdet Caner’s Aggregate Holdings and Signa Group have also proved high-profile casualties. However, not all market watchers are convinced that the bankruptcies have been inevitable.
Commenting on the wave of German insolvencies earlier in the year, Andrew Coombs, the CEO of business park REIT Sirius Real Estate, told PropertyEU: ‘We are not seeing a distressed market, this has got nothing to do with the economy on the ground, or with tenants. What we are seeing is pockets of distress, typically around the lending or the timing of the equity, not the asset.
‘This is capital that isn’t structured in the right way, in organisations who’ve arguably taken on too much risk. And what’s happening now is that they’ve been sitting there trying to outlast the market until such time as they can recover from an improving market.’
