The Financial Services division of a specialty chemicals group (15.3 billion euros turnover, 33,000 employees) had come under considerable pressure following restructuring and the departure of specialist staff. To make matters worse, the Executive Board was planning to spin off parts of the Group. In addition, new reporting rules from the Federal Network Agency and the North Rhine-Westphalia Regulatory Chamber posed further significant challenges. The interim manager, who had already been working as a finance executive at the company for some time, was tasked with ensuring that the financial statements of the electricity grid operating company were in order and supporting the planned carve-outs.
Annual financial statements adapted to new requirements under the Energy Industry Act
The first challenge in this project was to ensure that the HGB annual financial statements of the electricity grid company and the electricity activity report of the largest group company complied with the new federal and state reporting rules. To this end, the interim manager first clarified the new reporting requirements with the departments responsible for the electricity grids. Once the new reporting obligations had been identified, he worked with IT to adjust the corresponding account assignments in the SAP system.
In this context, the interim manager also succeeded in initiating accounting policy measures that enabled the reporting and auditing obligations of the electricity grid company to be avoided for two years. This led to savings of at least 50,000 euros.
Carve-out: founding a new company from parts of four subsidiaries
In the next step, the interim manager prepared the spin-off of a business unit from four group companies that was to be sold. A particular challenge in this carve-out was that the new company had to prepare auditable financial statements as quickly as possible in order to limit electricity costs in accordance with the EEG law. In addition, pension provisions had to be transferred from two of the four Group companies that were merged into the new business unit.
Prerequisites for limiting the EEG levy successfully completed
Electricity costs accounted for a significant proportion of the costs in the chemical company's newly founded business unit. In order to reduce these costs, the company wanted to apply for a cap on the EEG surcharge. In order to create the conditions for this application, the interim manager quickly prepared a short financial statement and a gross value added statement for the newly founded company (annual turnover of around 585 million euros, 715 employees). In particular, the interim manager contributed his expertise as a certified business valuer by:
- coordinating the audit procedures by two audit firms,
- coordinating the preparation of pension reports in accordance with IFRS and HGB,
- ensuring that the spin-off and integration balance sheets were consistent,
- booking purchase prices, appraisal values and goodwill and
- supporting the auditors and the M&A team by providing information.
Self-created AI model in Excel provides data for value added statement
A particular challenge was the timely provision of the gross value added statement for the new company's short financial year in accordance with the requirements of the Federal Office of Economics and Export Control. Among other things, several 10,000 individual documents had to be assigned to the respective reporting categories of the gross value added statement in order to be subsequently audited. The timely provision was only possible thanks to an AI model in Excel, which the interim manager had created and trained in advance of the carve-out.
Savings of 16 million euros realized with carve-out and EEG application
The measures taken by the current interim manager made a significant contribution to the success of the carve-out. The spin-off and the EEG application ultimately enabled the chemical company to achieve savings of around 16 million euros. The company management subsequently entrusted the interim manager with further carve-outs with a total annual turnover of more than 1.5 billion euros.
