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Company that borrowed billions from investors collapses into insolvency over unpaid Dutch tax

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.

Summary

• Anduril and Rheinmetall to develop Barracuda and Fury drones for Europe
• Partnership aims to enhance European military capabilities with US technology
• Importance of drones highlighted by Ukraine war, focus on rapid production and deployment

PARIS, June 18 (Reuters) - U.S. drone-maker Anduril and German defence giant Rheinmetall (RHMG.DE), opens new tab said on Wednesday they will partner to build aerial drones for European markets, in a sign of Europe leveraging American technology to boost military capabilities.

The companies will jointly-develop European variants of Anduril's Barracuda and Fury aerial drones, as well as exploring opportunities to build solid rocket motors, which are used to propel missiles and rockets.

"By integrating Anduril's solutions into Rheinmetall's European production setup and digital sovereignty framework, we’re building on that foundation to bring new kinds of autonomous capabilities into service, ones that are quick to produce, modular, and aligned with NATO’s evolving requirements," said Armin Papperger, CEO of Rheinmetall.

In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and amid concerns over U.S. defence commitments under President Donald Trump, many European nations have pledged to increase military spending.

However, Europe continues to depend heavily on U.S. defence firms to fill critical capability gaps - not only in traditional systems like fighter jets and missiles, but also in emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, low-Earth orbit satellites and drones.

California-based Anduril is part of a wave of U.S. defence technology companies - including AI firm Palantir and Elon Musk's SpaceX - that are challenging traditional defence manufacturing giants with faster innovation.

The war in Ukraine has shown the increasing importance of drones in modern warfare. The Barracuda is designed to be cheap, fast to build and easy to launch in large numbers and can act like a cruise missile. Fury is a more expensive, stealthier, longer-range drone designed for combat and surveillance.

"This is a different model of defense collaboration, one built on shared production, operational relevance, and mutual respect for sovereignty," said Brian Schimpf, CEO of Anduril Industries.

"Together with Rheinmetall, we’re building systems that can be produced quickly, deployed widely, and adapted as NATO missions evolve."

The company sees demand for more than 43,000 passenger and freighter aircraft between 2025 and 2044

Airbus AIR -0.79%decrease; red down pointing triangle said it would increase shareholder returns in the coming years, betting that strong demand for aircraft will continue to fuel growth.

The European plane maker said Wednesday that it was lifting its dividend payout ratio to between 30% and 50% from a current range of 30% to 40%. The company said special dividends and share buybacks remained on the table to return extra cash to shareholders.

The announcement came during the Paris Air Show trade event where Airbus secured several aircraft orders, underscoring strong demand for planes as airlines continue to expand capacity. LOT Polish Airlines ordered 20 A220-100 and 20 A220-300 narrow-body aircraft, while Saudi Arabia’s Riyadh Air ordered 25 A350-1000 wide-body aircraft.

Airbus sees demand for more than 43,000 passenger and freighter aircraft between 2025 and 2044, saying it expects a higher proportion of deliveries to replace older, less fuel-efficient planes.

Still, the group remains in a difficult spot: Airbus has to navigate uncertainty from President Trump’s tariffs, as well as supply-chain hurdles that have made it difficult to procure the parts it needs to assemble its planes.

The company backed its aircraft-delivery and financial targets for the year, which exclude any effects from tariffs. Chief Executive Guillaume Faury said in April that Airbus wouldn’t cover the cost of tariffs for aircraft imported from its overseas factories into the U.S.

The group expects to deliver roughly 820 commercial aircraft to customers this year, more than the 766 planes it dispatched in 2024. The company had shipped 243 planes by the end of May, cautioning that the bulk of deliveries would be made later in the year due to supply-chain bottlenecks.

Airbus recently agreed to acquire some Spirit AeroSystems Holdings facilities that make parts for its jets in the U.S., Europe and Africa, moving to take direct control of production in a bid to stabilize supply chains after months of disruption. Faury previously said that challenges, in particular with Spirit, were putting pressure on plans to ramp up production of its A220 narrow-body and A350 wide-body aircraft.

The company said Wednesday that working with suppliers helped it to mitigate the effect of supply-chain snags. However, procuring engines and cabin equipment remained difficult, it said.

Airbus expects to produce 14 of its A220 aircraft a month in 2026 and 75 A320 narrow-body planes a month in 2027. It also expects around four A330 planes a month, though it didn’t provide a date. For its bigger model, the company continues to target 12 A350s a month in 2028. Airbus has had to delay the entry of the A350 freighter variant into service to the second half of 2027 from 2026 previously.

Adjusted earnings before interest and taxes—Airbus’s preferred measure of profitability—are expected at around 7 billion euros ($8.04 billion) this year, while free cash flow before customer financing—a metric closely watched by analysts and investors—is projected at around 4.5 billion euros.

Investors have approached Anysphere, the company behind the popular AI coding assistant Cursor, offering to invest in the company at a valuation of $18 billion to $20 billion in recent weeks, Bloomberg reported. The company might not agree to the offers, according to the report.

But if the company does accept the funding, it would double its valuation from $9 billion earlier this month, when it raised $900 million led by Thrive Capital, Bloomberg reported, adding that the company had surpassed $500 million in annualized revenue.

Cursor has already helped define coding as a key application for large language models. The doubled valuation immediately following its last funding round would further establish Anysphere as a breakout winner of the generative AI boom.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been on something of a hiring spree lately, trying to staff up Meta’s new superintelligence team with top-tier AI researchers from competing labs. To work on a team led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and at a desk physically near Zuckerberg, Meta has reportedly offered employees from OpenAI and Google DeepMind compensation packages worth upwards of $100 million.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirmed those reports on a podcast with his brother, Jack Altman, which was published on Tuesday. However, the OpenAI CEO noted that Zuckerberg’s recruiting efforts have been largely unsuccessful and made sure to throw a few more digs at Meta in the process.

“[Meta has] started making these, like, giant offers to a lot of people on our team,” Sam Altman said on the podcast. “You know, like, $100 million signing bonuses, more than that [in] compensation per year […] I’m really happy that, at least so far, none of our best people have decided to take him up on that.”

The OpenAI CEO said he believed his employees made the assessment that OpenAI had a better chance of achieving AGI and may one day be the more valuable company. He also said he believes Meta’s focus on high compensation packages for employees, rather than the mission of delivering AGI, would likely not create a great culture.

Meta reportedly tried to poach one of OpenAI’s lead researchers, Noam Brown, as well as Google’s AI architect, Koray Kavukcuoglu. However, both efforts were unsuccessful.

Sam Altman went on to say he believes OpenAI’s culture of innovation has been a major key to its success, and that Meta’s “current AI efforts have not worked as well as they hoped.” The OpenAI CEO said he respects many things about Meta but noted he doesn’t “think they’re a company that’s great at innovation.” Later in the podcast, Altman said he believes it’s not enough for companies to catch up on AI — they have to truly innovate to stay ahead.

The OpenAI CEO’s comments highlight some of the challenges that Meta has to overcome in order to build out a successful AI superintelligence lab. Besides bringing on Wang, Meta announced last week that it invested significantly in Wang’s former company, Scale AI. The company has also reportedly nabbed a few star AI researchers, such as Google DeepMind’s Jack Rae and Sesame AI’s Johan Schalkwyk. But there’s more work ahead.

In the coming year, Meta will have to staff up its new AI team while OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind operate at full speed. In the coming months, OpenAI is expected to release an open AI model that’s likely to set Meta back in the AI race even further.

Later on in the podcast, Sam Altman described an AI-powered social media feed that seems likely to encroach on Meta’s apps. The OpenAI CEO said he’s curious about exploring a social media app that uses AI to deliver custom feeds based on what users want, rather than the default, algorithmic feed that exists on traditional social media apps.

OpenAI is reportedly working on a social networking app internally. Meanwhile, Meta is experimenting with an AI-powered social network through its Meta AI app. However, it seems that some users are confused by the Meta AI app and have shared some hyperpersonal chats with the broader world.

Whether AI-powered social networks take off remains to be seen. In the meantime, Zuckerberg and Sam Altman seem poised to butt heads over the AI talent race.

Through its quarterly "Luxury Pulse" survey, the retailer gets into the heads of luxury shoppers across the U.S.

America’s luxury consumers are down on the economy — and that’s no surprise to Saks Global.

On Tuesday, the retailer detailed the results of the latest Saks Global Luxury Pulse survey to WWD, getting into the heads of luxury consumers. The survey found that optimism about the economy continues to decline, driven by economic uncertainty and market volatility.

Fielded from April 24 to April 28, the Luxury Pulse indicated that America’s affluent have been affected by market volatility and flip-flopping tariffs, are worried about a possible recession and are increasingly discerning when spending on luxury. The quarterly survey gathered responses online from 1,248 U.S.-based luxury consumers over age 18 during a time when many of the tariffs in U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war had been paused, starting a 90-day period of negotiation.

Among luxury consumers, the top five concerns are the general social and political climate, a potential recession, personal financial security, stock market volatility and ongoing global conflict.

“We’ve been doing these surveys for a few years and this is another one of those market declines,” said Emily Essner, president and chief commercial officer of Saks Global. “This is a meaningful decline.”

But the situation isn’t entirely bad. “While we saw a decline in how consumers felt about the macro environment, we also saw optimism about their personal finances.” The luxury spending is more tied to how consumer feel about the macro environment, rather than their personal finances, she said.

In addition, “When we think about higher-income spenders, they are last in, first out,” Essner said, meaning, they’re the last group to put the reins on spending during challenging economic times, and the first to rev up their spending when the economy rebounds.

“There is still a desire to spend for moments that are special,” Essner said, referring to holidays, birthdays and other special occasions.

While the survey showed economic sentiments declining, Essner did suggest that attitudes could have changed for the better since the survey was taken in April. Saks’ next Luxury Pulse, to be taken during the summer, could tell a different story from the latest one.

“The most important thing is to understand where their heads are at,” Essner said. The Luxury Pulse, she said, is an important tool for that, helping Saks executives plan and forecast their business.

Given the shifting attitudes among consumers, Essner said the company has to work harder to convey the value, timeliness and high quality of the fashion products it sells and to emphasize that much of the assortment contains “investment pieces” meaning they’ll last well into the future and are not trendy.

In addition, given the state of mind of the luxury consumer, personalization has become an even more important part of the Saks Global strategy, Essner said. Asked if Saks will be more promotional, Essner replied, “We wouldn’t anticipate significantly changing our approach.”

While acknowledging that consumers do get more motivated to shop during strong promotions, Essner said that, “In the end, our strategy is to be decreasing promotionality overall,” and to be more “targeted” with promotions.

Essner also acknowledged that given the dynamic nature of the macro environment and consumer attitudes, planning becomes more challenging. “It’s definitely hard to think six to eight months down the road,” she said.

She also said there were no indicators that luxury consumers were shifting discretionary dollars to areas such as travel and entertainment at the expense of fashion.

Among the key findings from the Luxury Pulse:

• The luxury consumer’s intent to spend on luxury has softened compared to recent surveys, with 47 percent planning to spend the same or more on luxury in the next three months. This represents the lowest level since tracking by Saks began in April 2023, and a decline of 11 percentage points compared with the prior survey.
• Twenty-eight percent of respondents reported feeling optimistic about the economy, which is a decline of 13 percentage points compared with the prior survey fielded in January 2025 and a decline of 17 percentage points compared with the survey fielded in April 2024.
• Luxury consumers are feeling significantly less calm about the economy, with 32 percent feeling calm, representing a decline of 13 percentage points compared with the prior survey and down 22 percentage points compared with the same time last year.
• Despite a decrease in optimism about the economy, the majority of luxury consumers remain optimistic about their personal finances. Sixty-seven percent of those with an income of $200,000 or more said they feel prepared when it comes to their personal finances.

Formerly known as the Saks Luxury Pulse, following the completion of Saks Global’s acquisition of Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman in December, the survey’s scope broadened and it was rebranded as the Saks Global Luxury Pulse. For the year ended Feb. 1, Saks said revenues totaled $3.8 billion. That included about $432 million in sales from Neiman Marcus Group, which was acquired on Dec. 23. Incorporating Neiman’s business for the whole year, sales fell 10 percent to $7.3 billion.