- Posted by jbehrendt on August 31, 2009
The last weeks I spent relaxing in my nice summer house close to the beaches of the Datca Peninsula. The only interruption to continous sunbathing, swimming, eating and drinking was the still ongoing restructuring project in Germany. As you know from my last post, we had finished all documentation just in time, we had received the confirmation from the tax authorities that the carve-outs could be done without taxing the hidden reserves, and the company agreed with their employees about the details of the transfer of a couple of 10,000 employees into the new entity. The only missing part seemed to be the necessary confirmation from the supervisory boards and the general assemblies of both companies, for which dates were fixed as of the end of August - just in time before the deadline for registration with the trade registry to be done the latest 31.8.2009.
However, the devil is in the details. The whole time between the completion of documents and the relevant meetings, I received at least 3 to 5 emails per day with last-minute changes, some minor modifications in wordings, some strange requests to change details of the transactions (which was of course impossible), technical issues of how to complete the transactions in detail, and of course a lot of mails related to the last and most relevant presentation to the company authorities.
In the last week, again I found it confirmed that living in Datca - more exactly, living behind Datca, rather close to Knidos - is not a favourite location for doing business with Germany. Of course I had to participate in the meetings of the supervisory boards and the general assembly meetings, which were fortunately all scheduled for one single day. The trip from my house to Dalaman airport takes already 2.5 hours, and of course conveniently timed direct flights to the city of my choice in Germany are not available. So the tour continues with a Turkish Airlines flight from Dalaman to Istanbul, and a connection flight to Germany. Leaving the beach at around 16.00 in the afternoon, I reached my hotel in Germany after only 9 hours at 1.00 local time.
The night was short, the meetings next day were therefore much longer. However, the presentations went very well - mainly because, in the meantime, all relevant decisionmakers hd been informed already in separate meetings, and have received the relevant documentation. So, in the end, the work of nearly 18 months came to a successful end - the decisions were unanimously confirmed by both the supervisory boards and the general assemblies, and finally everybody was happy that now the requested simplification in the company structure could be achieved - a target defined but not reached for more than five years.
And so, the project is over. My trip back to Datca was therefore a very nice one, despite the unconvenient timing - leaving Germany at 1.30 at night, arriving in Istanbul at 5.40, continuing to Dalaman from 7.40 to 9.00 and finally arriving back in my house around 12.00, with direct continuation to the beach again. First I celebrated a little bit, finishing the available wine depots in the hotel and later in the plane, and then I was just tired and slept and slept and slept, more or less uninterrupted until the evening after my return. It was worth it - the project is a great success, and I felt very satisfied that one of my most difficult projects had been succcessfully completed.
So how does it go on? Stay on - I will keep you posted...