The ailing real estate investor Adler still has to worry about the audit of its balance sheets for the past year.

The auditing firm KPMG has announced that it will not accept the appointment as auditor for the German subsidiary Adler Real Estate, the Luxembourg parent company Adler Group and Adler Real Estate announced on Wednesday evening. KPMG had refused to provide Adler Group with an audit opinion for the 2021 annual financial statements, citing a lack of information on transactions with persons related to Adler, and also refused to accept the mandate for 2022. All other major auditors had also declined.

By applying to the local court for a court appointment, Adler had hoped that KPMG in Luxembourg would then also take on the parent company. This hope has now been dashed. The problem for Adler is that an audited balance sheet is a prerequisite for the billions in loans that Adler has taken out. Adler had agreed with an important group of creditors that the annual financial statements for 2022 would not have to be presented until December 2023 and not by April as originally required.

(Report by Alexander Hübner, edited by Birgit Mittwollen. If you have any questions, please contact our editorial team at berlin.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (for politics and the economy) or frankfurt.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (for companies and markets)).