The logistics entrepreneur and billionaire Klaus-Michael Kühne is allowed to become the largest shareholder in Deutsche Lufthansa AG. The Federal Cartel Office has approved the increase in its shareholding from 10 percent to 15.01 percent, as reported in Bonn on Wednesday.

It is true that Kuehne Nagel International is one of the world’s largest logistics providers and has already been a major customer of Lufthansa’s freight division. Competitive disadvantages for the competition are not to be feared, the cartel office decided.

Billionaire Klaus-Michael Kühne has increased his stake in Lufthansa from 10 percent to exactly 15.01 percent. Kühne thus holds around one percent more than the Economic Stabilization Fund WSF, which last held 14.1 percent of Lufthansa shares. “Even if, as a result of Kühne’s participation in Lufthansa, less free capacity would be available for other air freight customers in the future, they would still have enough alternatives,” said the President of the Bundeskartellamt, Andreas Mundt. Capacity bottlenecks played a lesser role in air freight than in the passenger business. An increasing supply of freight capacity is also to be expected.

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According to industry experts, the entrepreneur is apparently targeting Lufthansa’s lucrative freight business. Many large shipping companies have recently invested in the air freight sector, where there was a lot of money to be made due to the high freight rates due to the corona pandemic.

Kuehne is the majority shareholder of the logistics group Kuehne Nagel and a major shareholder in the Hamburg container shipping company Hapag-Lloyd. In addition, the 85-year-old has already invested several millions in the second division club Hambuger SV and, among other things, saved the naming rights to the Volksparkstadion with three million euros. The entrepreneur ranks 33rd on the Forbes list of billionaires with an estimated fortune of $32 billion.

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