The boss of the insolvent toilet paper manufacturer Hakle also blames the delayed payment of state aid for his bankruptcy filing. “If we had received state aid faster, we wouldn’t be insolvent now,” said the owner, Volker Jung, to the “Handelsblatt”. “We’re talking about a seven-figure amount that we would have been entitled to and that we urgently needed to finance our energy costs.”
Hakle from Düsseldorf filed for insolvency proceedings under self-administration last Monday. In August, the company paid six times as much money for gas and electricity as in the same month of 2019, owner Jung told the “Handelsblatt”.
The state had promised companies like Hakle support through the energy cost containment program. The production of toilet paper is considered to be particularly energy-intensive. According to Hakle, he submitted an application on July 18. “We asked about it in mid-August. The responsible office said that they still had to set up the IT system for this,” Jung told the newspaper. Until the bankruptcy application, Hakle “didn’t see a cent”, now the company is no longer entitled to receive payments.
At the request of the newspaper, the Federal Ministry of Economics announced that there had been “several queries to the company due to missing information and documents”. The competent Federal Office of Economics and Export Control was not informed of an imminent insolvency. There are no IT problems that prevent a payment.
Hakle boss Jung calls for a price cap on the gas price. “If politicians don’t manage to stabilize energy prices quickly, then we are at the beginning of a major wave of insolvencies in Germany.”
