The administrator to an insolvent German property company which collapsed last year owing more than £1 bn to small investors has awarded a work-out mandate for the assets.
Dolphin Trust, which renamed as German Property Group in 2019, took savings from thousands of individuals, mainly in the UK, Ireland and Asia.
The company was founded by Charles Smethurst, a German-British businessman, who used the capital to buy more than 60 run-down vacant properties which he told investors would be redeveloped, mainly as residential.
The administrator, appointed after German Property Group filed for insolvency in Bremen in July 2020, has retained CR Investment Management to sell the assets.
CR will act as exclusive seller to the properties, many of which are listed and some of which are vacant plots. ‘The purpose of the mandate is an optimal realisation of the assets within the framework of a structured bidding process’, CR said.
Claudius Meyer, managing director of CR, said they would work on making the properties more marketable, ‘so as to sell them off one by one over the coming weeks and months.’
The first to be marketed is a 17,600 m2 plot in Panketal on the edge of Berlin’s city limits. It has consent for 237 residential unts with 17,000 m2 of space.
CR said it will market digitally, using software from technology partners realxdata - which provides digitised overviews of properties, transaction data and socio-economic location details - and Cloudbrixx, which runs the DAVE virtual transaction data room.
The adminstrator to the company and its assets is Justus von Buchwaldt of lawyer BBL Brockdorff & Partner.
The public prosecutor’s office in Hanover, near where Dolphin was founded, is investigating alleged fraud and other offences by Smethurst and two other company officials.
Investors came into Dolphin via an investment vehicle called DC80 and issued loan notes paying 10% annual interest which they were told were secured against investments.
A GPG creditors group represents more than 1,700 investors in the UK.
