BERLIN, Oct. 17 (Xinhua) -- The first creditors' meeting concerning the insolvency of the German shipping container lessor P&R took place in Munich on Wednesday.
P&R had gone bankrupt in March, whereupon one of the biggest economic scandals in German post-war history became public.
According to the responsible insolvency trustee, Michael Jaffe, P&R had allegedly sold about 1.6 million shipping containers of which only 618,000 have been located so far. P&R is accused of having sold approximately one million non-existent containers to their investors.
Investors bought shipping containers from P&R, which then leased the containers back from the investors to charter them to large shipping companies. In return, the investors received a quarterly rental payment and P&R guaranteed to repurchase the used container after five years.
Investigations by the insolvency administrator showed that P&R allegedly used newly raised funds to pay out old investors from 2007 onwards instead of investing the money in new containers, resulting in a so-called snowball system.
P&R collected a total of 3.5 billion euros (4.04 billion U.S. dollars) from 54,000 investors. According to the German Press Agency (dpa), the fraud could cause damages of up to 2 billion euros.
Heinz Roth, founder of P&R, has been in pre-trial confinement since mid-September. "We are assuming intentional action," said a press representative of the Munich public prosecution office.
Following the bankruptcy of P&R, investors have filed more than 80,000 claims. Up to 9,000 people were expected to attend the meeting of P&R creditors, making it one of the largest scandals in Germany since 1945. The public and the press are not allowed to attend the meetings.
In 2003, Manfred Schmider, head of the German construction machinery company FlowTex, was sentenced to 11.5 years of imprisonment for causing the largest economic scandal in Germany so far with more than 2 billion euros of losses.
