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Lars Windhorst’s Tennor Holding, which borrowed billions from investors and was once at the heart of the German financier’s business empire, has been declared bankrupt at the request of Dutch tax authorities.
An Amsterdam court on Tuesday appointed a liquidator for the Netherlands-based entity, according to public filings. Dutch tax authorities asked a court to wind up the company over an unpaid €5.3mn claim, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Tennor was for more than a decade Windhorst’s main investment company and the linchpin of a business empire fuelled by heavy borrowing and complex financing arrangements involving illiquid stocks and bonds.
The Dutch holding company borrowed billions of euros from investors including France’s H2O Asset Management, ploughing the proceeds into trophy assets that included Hertha Berlin football club and Italian lingerie maker La Perla.
Tennor Holding has not published accounts for years, however, and Dutch regulators suspended its former auditor for two years because of negligence in auditing its books. The company last reported about €3bn of debt and other liabilities in unaudited financial statements for 2020.
Tennor Group, an umbrella term Windhorst uses to describe his overall investment business, told the Financial Times that since 2022 it had “reorganised in a new and separate corporate structure” and that Tennor Holding had been “for the last few years an inactive company with no revenues and no employees”.
Tennor Group added that it had “disputed” the claim from Dutch tax authorities, and that Windhorst and the group “remain committed to keep paying down its debt”.
Tennor Holding has faced multiple claims in recent years from aggrieved creditors in courts in London and Amsterdam. Windhorst’s businesses also suffered when its main backer H2O, a star of French investment that at its peak managed €30bn in assets, became embroiled in a scandal in 2019 due to its investments linked to the financier.
Windhorst first shot to fame while still a teenager in the 1990s, when he was widely hailed as a business “wunderkind” and forged a close bond with then German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. But in the following decade he endured a bruising downfall, encompassing corporate and personal bankruptcies, that culminated in a suspended jail sentence in 2010.
In recent years, Windhorst has shifted to cutting new deals out of Swiss entity Tennor International, which has in at least one instance bought assets out of insolvency from a company previously owned by Tennor Holding.
Tennor International has also been subject to lawsuits from creditors in the past year, however.
A formal insolvency process at Tennor Holding could shed further light on where money raised from Windhorst’s investors was spent.
In 2023, Windhorst was presented with evidence under cross-examination in London’s High Court that he had taken substantial loans from companies such as Tennor Holding, while billing expenses such as private jet costs and luxury hotels to his companies.
Windhorst told the court that “all these activities are related to business”, adding that he worked “seven days a week” and that all his entertainment expenses were client-related.
H2O last week lost an appeal at France’s highest administration court against a record fine levied by the country’s financial regulator in 2022 in relation to its dealings with Windhorst. The investment firm, which was also reprimanded by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority last year, faces a Paris court hearing next week in a lawsuit from investors claiming damages due to investments linked to the financier.
