Corestate - comment

The two former Aggregate Financial Services employees, Johannes Märklin and Sebastian Ernst, were dismissed from the Board of Corestate and have left the Company on the 7th February. This has come as a surprise to us given they were the founders of AFS, which Corestate purchased for €113m in January 2021. Just over a year later, both have left. Has the Aggregate connection made fundraising more difficult at the Corestate debt platform Helvetic Financial Services (HFS) entity (at which Ernst and Märklin also had board seats). We had been in touch with this team, who incidentally share a similar DB background to John Nacos and - errr - Wolfgang. In terms of our inroads into the company, their departure therefore represents another setback to our efforts to gain comfort around Corestate.

With the convertible bond falling due in November this year, Corestate has to make progress on HFS’s fundraising quickly in order to refinance both the converts and April-23 bonds.