Attorney Roderich Schaetze: Thai Courts Deal elumeo SE Group a Heavy Blow – Workers Have the Right to Enter the PWK Premises, and Confiscate Assets – Operator of Juwelo TV in the Midst of a Violent Storm of Legal Disputes

CHANTABURI,
THAILAND/ BERLIN, GERMANY – Newsaktuell – Sept. 19, 2019�- The chain of
disastrous events for elumeo SE, the operator of Juwelo TV, continues.
Following questionable management by Wolfgang Boyé, Thomas
Jarmuske and Bernd Fischer, for the past couple of years the company
is in free downfall dragging the subsidiaries with them into the abyss.
According to a decision of the Thai Labour Court dated September 12th,
2019, former PWK employees who have received neither salary nor statutory
severance pay, may make use of the company’s property (Case No. Ror 757/2662).
The workers do now have the right to immediately enter the PWK premises,
identify any and all assets and confiscate them to be sold at public auction.
This means that the strategy of orderly liquidation advocated by elumeo at the
Shareholder Meeting in August 7^th,
2019 can no longer be implemented. Against this backdrop, the provisions
of 7.7 million Euros should under no circumstances be sufficient.
Further financial burdens are to be expected.

A Thai Labour Court has granted former employees of PWK Jewelery Company Limited the right to immediately enter the PWK premises, identify any and all assets and confiscate them to be sold to compensate them for unpaid salaries and severance payments. The employees had already demonstrated in front of the German embassy in Bangkok. PWK was no longer able to pay the salaries and the statutory severance payments after the German parent company elumeo SE had ordered and received jewellery through other subsidiaries for around 30 million euros, but only paid a fraction of it. Over 600 employees lost their jobs. The three German managers of elumeo, Wolfgang Boyé, Bernd Fischer and Thomas Jarmuske, are being investigated for fraud by the German public prosecutor’s office and the Thai police authorities.

The
elumeo management is currently in the midst of a violent storm of legal
disputes: elumeo’s management is criminally investigated for fraud, both
in Germany and Thailand. Tens of million EUR lawsuits are filed
against the company by SWM Treuhandgesellschaft AG, on behalf of elumeo’s
subsidiary and manufacturing arm PWK Jewelry Limited (Thailand). In addition to
that, Kat Florence Design Limited sues elumeo SE for damages due to
non-performance of contractual obligations. A former member of the Board of
Directors has also brought actions against elumeo SE for unlawful resolutions
of the Board of Directors passed forcefully by the Chairman Wolfgang Boye.
Also Ottoman Strategy Holdings SA (OSH), major shareholder of elumeo SE, filed
a lawsuit claiming deliberate untrue statements by Chairman Boye, in
shareholder meetings and claims the nullity of, among other things, Ingo
Stober’s election to the board. A further lawsuit for the immediate
appointment of a special auditor to investigate the actions of elumeo’s management
with regard to the situation in Thailand, possible unlawful tax reductions
and the constantly deteriorating financial situation of the company is in
preparation.

Last
year, in December 2018, elumeo’s management ordered the “solvent
liquidation” of PWK Jewelry Company, without paying anything from its debt
of more than 30 Million Euro for jewelry manufactured with bank loans
in Thailand and exported to Germany. Furthermore, elumeo’s
management, instead of providing a coherent plan for liquidation to the PWK
Management, demanded that PWK Directors should come up with a solution to the
financial havoc created by the management of elumeo SE. They asked them to pay
the salaries and creditors with supposedly “readily accessible
liquidity” consisting among other things in company assets such as
buildings which are under the mortgage from Siam Commercial Bank (Thailand), a
VAT refund expected in several years’ time or a remaining stock of unused
leftover gems (most of them also unpaid to the suppliers).

This
incapacity of elumeo to provide any solution to the huge financial gap created
by them, led the unpaid workers of the PWK factory to seek their rights in Thai
courts. On September 12, 2019, under Case No. Ror 757/2662, they were
granted by the Thai Labour Court of Region 2 a Writ of Execution, appointing
488 former employees of PWK as the “execution officer to confiscate and
sequestrate the assets of the Debtor”, giving them the right to
immediately enter the PWK premises, identify any and all assets and confiscate
them to be sold at public auction.

This
is an enormous blow to the elumeo group, because, together with the special
requisition order already issued by the Thai government against PWK’s land and
building this will make any controlled sale of the company assets impossible,
placing the company on an unstoppable and uncontrollable downfall, which could
possibly lead to the insolvency of PWK or even of elumeo group. On the same
time, one by one, PWK unpaid suppliers started to sue, led by the big diamond
supplier Flawless and followed by the Thai supplier Bright Future. Many other
suppliers, including the logistics and security international G4S company are
not yet paid either.

In
view of these last developments, elumeo groups major shareholder Ottoman Strategy
Holdings (OSH is, again, demanding the immediate appointment of a special
auditor to the group, in order to clarify the activities of the criminally
investigated management led by Chairman Boye and executive directors Tomas
Jarmuske and Bernd Fischer. The reluctance of other shareholders,
especially Frankfurt Performance Management AG (FPM), represented by Raik
Hoffmann, to agree to such an audit, while declare their support for a
criminally investigated Chairman at elumeo’s Shareholder Meeting is hard to
comprehend for shareholders who are in favor of a special auditor.

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Picture is available at epa european pressphoto agency ( http://www.epa.eu )
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The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.