Global Trade Alert

On October 5, 2009, the General Meeting of the German bank Hypo Real Estate passed a resolution that involuntarily forced minority shareholders, some of them foreign, to sell. The bank was partly nationalised after the 2008 financial crisis through capital injection and the German state, through its Financial Markets Stabilisation Fund, then expressed its willingness to take full control of the bank by becoming the sole shareholder. However, the government had to deal with the refusal of some minority shareholders, among them the American private equity investor JC Flowers. JC Flowers bought a 25 percent stake of Hypo Real Estate at 22.50 EUR per share in June 2008, that refused to sell out at a market price that had fallen below 2 EUR in winter 2009. That is why Germany had to pass a law authorising the government to expropriate shareholders of banks (against compensation at the market price): the Financial Market Stabilization Supplementary Act (Finanzmarktstabilisierungsergänzungsgesetz in German) especially designed to expropriate JC Flowers from Hypo Real Estate was definitively passed on April 7, 2009.
The expropriation of minority shareholders came into effect on October 13, 2009 after that the Regional Court of Munich entered it into the Commercial Register.
The Financial Markets Stabilisation Fund bought the remaining shares for 1.30 EUR each.