Signa puts Chrysler Building up for sale in urgent effort to raise cash

Signa Holding is in negotiations to sell half of New York’s Chrysler Building to urgently raise cash, the collapsed European property company’s administrator has said, as he warned of a protracted and financially painful wind-down ahead.

Creditors of the Austrian company, founded by swashbuckling young developer René Benko, met in Vienna on Tuesday to hear administrator Christof Stapf give his first assessment of its finances since insolvency proceedings began last month.

Stapf told them he and other outside advisers were still struggling to understand — or gain control over — Signa Holding’s sprawling network of subsidiaries and assets.

The holding company urgently needs cash to pay for its own wind-down, Stapf stressed, but has relatively little that it can immediately put on the market.

“The sale of Signa Holding’s Cessna Citation XLS private jet is under way . . . [and] discussions are also being held regarding the investment in Signa RFR US Selection AG, whose US real estate projects include the Chrysler Building in New York,” he said in a statement.

Signa Holding owes just over €5bn to creditors. So far €1.1bn of claims have been filed ahead of a mid-January deadline.

Analysts at JPMorgan estimated the broader Signa Group, which Signa Holding sits at the centre of, owes €13bn.

That figure is based on limited publicly available data, however, and restructuring advisers working with Signa say the true figure may be much higher.

“The issue is we do not know really at all about the scale of the borrowing. And even though we are relatively early in this process, that’s not normal. None of this is very normal at all,” said a lawyer working with one Signa creditor.

The art deco Chrysler Building, completed in 1930, was briefly New York’s tallest tower before being overtaken by the Empire State Building.

The property is half owned by Aby Rosen, the developer whose group, RFR, is also the managing partner. RFR and Signa paid…