Earlier this month Fraport Group reported the payout of the highest-ever dividend in its history for 2018. The news carried the fact that the Fraport profits rode in on the back of Greeks and the 14 regional airports they operate by concession. But the larger question looms, “Is this good news for Greeks?”
Also in the news, shareholders of Fraport A.G. were briefed on plans to boost investments by subsidiaries in Greece, Brazil, and Peru, all countries that have undergone massive economic upheaval in the last few years.
According to the news, the Frankfurt general assembly of shareholders decided to issue a dividend of 2 euros per share, up 50 cents – or one-third – from the dividend distributed for 2017. Fraport’s international activities and services account for 36% of EBITDA, reaching 1.1 billion euros (12.5 percent).
Fraport paid an upfront concession fee of €1.234 billion – the biggest concession fee in Greece’s history – to the state-owned Hellenic Republic Asset Development Fund (HRADF) back in April 2017. It seems likely that all or most of the upfront payment was probably earmarked to repay part of the debt owed the same Frankfurt bankers who formed the consortium that lent Fraport the concession funds to pay Greece. Whether this is certain or not, Fraport and other German institutions certainly are doing well off of the Greek people’s hardship.
We can see a window inside these dealings by researching how the Greek bankers and Europe’s central financiers ruined Greece’s economy in the first place. A good example of what I would call profiteering can be seen in the fact that Fraport’s CEO Stefan Schulte has been a Member of Supervisory Board at Deutsche Post AG since April 21, 2009. I mention this here because PostBank had fairly massive negative exposure because of Greek bonds. This report details a turnaround in the banks Greek exposure as well as massive profit turnaround as of 2013. While Deutsche Bank has gradually taken over PostBank since the great recession of 2008/2009, Schulte has been privy to the divestiture and new strategies in my opinion. His relationship with Frankfurter Sparkasse and that bank’s chairman Robert Restani is worth mentioning here too. I’ll not dig deeper into Landesbank Hessen-Thüringen Girozentrale and the internal German sharks killing one another off. The dirty business of banking frankly disgusts me.
The point of this report is to reiterate how the mafia-like banking elites in the western hemisphere operate. This in depth analysis of the Greek debt crisis points to the culpability of these bankers and reveals how the public was forced to pay for the whole mess created by Luxembourg, Frankfurt, and the central banks. Now we learn of the German efficiency with which Greek airports are sending profits back to the same people who caused the need for such concessions in the first place. The reality is, the socialization of the bank losses of the elites in Europe has been used as a pretext to rob the people of Greece and other countries outside France, Germany, and Benelux. Now that Greeks are holding the burden of all that dept, the German companies move in to take concessions and to grab privatizations.
Anyone who cannot see the writing on the wall is simply blind in my view. 20% of Fraport is owned by Stadtwerke Frankfurt am Main Holding GmbH, Deutsche Lufthansa AG, the State of Hesse, and Lazard Asset Management LLC. The biggest investors in Fraport are unknown, but it’s interesting to note that the Athens government hired Lazard to advise them on bailout strategy back in 2015. This was back when Prime Minister Tsipras was supposedly going nose to nose with the IMF and the bankers on behalf of the Greek people. I guess he wanted the investors who would invest in privatized Greek assets to tell him what to do.
Any now you know why good investment news for German companies at Greek airports is not good news for Greeks. Those profits could have been in Greek hands, had the bailout boondoggle not taken place. Next time I’ll get into how Piraeus and other Greek players are getting in bed with entities like Sweden’s Intrum, also not to the benefit of Greeks in my view.