The voice always has a brittle sound; sometimes Max Müller starts a sentence, gets confused and has to start again. But as unsure as the 78-year-old Swiss appeared in front of the Stuttgart regional court on Monday, he is sure about the matter that he wants to make clear. “I am firmly convinced that as CEO of Alno AG I have never violated applicable law,” says the former boss of what was once the largest German kitchen manufacturer, which at its peak generated sales of around 650 million euros with almost 3,000 employees. “I firmly reject the allegations made by the public prosecutor.” The public prosecutor’s office has accused Müller, together with Alno’s former chief financial officer Ipek Demirtas, of causing the downfall of the company, which went bankrupt in 2017 to clarify. The accusation: deliberate delay in insolvency, loan fraud, bankruptcy and breach of trust. In the years before the bankruptcy, Müller and Demirtas made the key decisions at the company, which has not made a loss in just five years since going public in 1995. When the situation came to a head in spring 2016, the defendants negotiated with the Bosnian business family Hastor about a stake in order to stabilize Alno. However, Müller soon fell out with the investor, who would soon become world-famous because he and his supplier Prevent paralyzed Volkswagen’s production. Growing up in poor circumstances, Max Müller never had the desire to take over the troubled company from Pfullendorf in Baden as he told the court on Monday. Growing up in poor circumstances, his father was a laborer in a foundry and his mother was a cleaning lady, Müller felt the “desire for independence” as a child and left his parents’ home in Ramsen, Switzerland, near Lake Constance, towards Basel at the age of 16. A commercial apprenticeship was followed by further school visits, which Müller financed with unskilled work. “Due to my hard work and my ambition as well as the need to stand on my own two feet, I have gradually been given more and more responsibility in various companies,” says the Swiss. In the mid-1980s, he ran Asko Deutsche Kaufhaus for Metro’s predecessor AG took over the Eastern European business, then took over the chairmanship of the Asko subsidiary Comco in 1985 and two years later the head position of the Adler clothing works, which also belonged to the trading group. When Asko’s successor company Metro was restructured in 1992, Müller left, took over Comco in a management buyout – and developed the business model that would ultimately bring him to the top position at Alno in 2011. “The goal was to further expand my large network with potential investors and institutional investors as well as banks and to act as a financing service provider,” explains Müller.More on the topicIn 2010, Alno AG was once again in extreme distress. A capital increase had failed again, but Müller’s predecessor as CEO, Jörg Deisel, needed money for his “Alno 2013” restructuring concept. The plan approved by the supervisory board and drawn up by the auditing firm PWC provided for severance payments and a streamlining of production. Müller’s network saves AlnoAt the beginning of 2011, the situation came to a head. In addition to negative equity, there were high payment arrears. A supervisory board established contact with Müller, and after a capital increase, the floundering company received 26.1 million euros, of which around 15 million euros were raised via Müller’s Comco network. It was agreed that Müller would join the supervisory board in order to represent the interests of the investors he was addressing. However, after Müller learned shortly after the capital increase that important managers were threatening to leave the company “because of CEO Deisel’s despotic management style”, He spoke to the supervisory board, which fired Deisel and appointed Müller himself as CEO “due to a lack of alternatives”. “This was never my wish, but I owed it to my investors and my network to ensure that Alno AG does not get into difficulties,” explains Müller in front of the regional court. Müller calls the public prosecutor’s allegations inaccurate and unfounded. “Alno AG was not insolvent in the entire period up to mid-2017,” says the Swiss, referring to a report from the auditing firm Aderhold commissioned by Müller and Demirtas. A critical situation only arose after the Bosnian investor relocated the accounting to Bosnia and converted the factories to just-in-time production, which is common in the automotive industry. The loan fraud against the Hastors never happened because “I never applied for a loan.” The public prosecutor painted an inaccurate picture. Rather, it was forced on Alno AG by the Bosnian business family in order to gain control of the company as quickly as possible . With regard to the allegations of infidelity, Müller attacks the public prosecutor’s office, which has painted a picture that the supervisory board approved various bonus payments and risk premiums in favor of Müller at his instigation. “I find it unbelievable that the public prosecutor’s office portrays the supervisory board members as puppets of mine,” says Müller. “These experienced personalities would of course have forbidden themselves such things and sent me into the desert.” The voice that they utter is as aggressive as the words are. When Müller talks about his economic situation, the entrepreneur struggles to hold back tears and repeatedly pauses. “I have never enriched myself. On the contrary, I lost most of my assets due to the bankruptcy,” concludes the former boss of Alno. “And in the prosecution’s indictment there is not the slightest hint that I was good for anything.”
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