Lilium files for insolvency again

The German startup Lilium has faced several difficult turns lately, and was already heading towards insolvency when an investor stepped in on Christmas Eve last year to save the company. At the time, Lilium stated that the investor consortium Mobile Uplift Corporation signed a purchase agreement for the assets of the Lilium subsidiaries, and all 750 employees that had been let go would be rehired.

It was then revealed that the investor consortium would fund Lilium with €200 million to continue operations, however, the funds were conditional, based on a restructuring process that had not been completed. By the sixth of January, four investors had already transferred an initial €5 million to the consortium, but this still maintained the option of pulling out.

By mid-February, things were looking dire for Lilium again – employees were still waiting to be paid their salaries from the month prior, and shareholder Frank Thelen admitted that the company was burning through €10 million per month just to handle operating expenses.

Now, new revelations show that the promised funding was not exactly what had been announced: “Despite all our efforts, the advanced financing options that were supposed to secure your salary payments and the future of Lilium have unfortunately come to nothing,” Lilium wrote in an email to employees. However, the management stated that it wants to continue talks with investors and therefore still hopes that Lilium will continue.

According to the German business publication Manager Magazin, the ‘Mobile Uplift Corporation’ was not really backed by the announced consortium of investors. “The money, according to the secret plan, was to come mainly from someone else: Marian Boček (42), Slovakian entrepreneur and head of the battery company InoBat,” writes the magazine. Boček is said to have written to Lilium co-founder Daniel Wiegand via LinkedIn when he heard about the problems – and offered his help.

Boček had subsequently repeatedly held out the prospect of a short-term payment of the urgently expected 150 million euros, so there was renewed hope at the beginning of the week. However, this money has apparently not materialised either and other interim solutions that the management was working on in parallel have probably not been implemented either. As the German business paper Wirtschaftswoche now writes, “Boček is only a trustee and may not have the necessary capital himself.” The only thing that is certain is that the Inobat founder has not transferred the instalments – despite claims to the contrary in recent weeks – possibly because he is ‘also waiting for the money from his financier’, according to WiWo.

wiwo.de, mananger-magazin.com (both in German)