News agency DAPD files for insolvency
The DAPD news agency is insolvent. DAPD filed for insolvency under self-administration on Tuesday at the Charlottenburg District Court in Berlin, the company announced.
The shareholders have discontinued further financing. Six other DAPD subsidiaries are to follow suit on Thursday, including the sports service that was only launched last year, according to staff. A total of 299 out of 515 employees are affected. The holding company DAPD Media and the other 18 companies in the group are not affected by the insolvency, the company announced.
Insolvency expert Wolf von der Fecht has been appointed managing director of the insolvent companies. By the end of November, he is to examine whether the company can be restructured and continued and look for new investors. DAPD's business continued unchanged.
DAPD was created in summer 2010 from the two news agencies DAPD and DDP. The two investors Peter Löw and Martin Vorderwülbecke, owners of Deutscher Depeschendienst (DDP), had bought the German-language service of the US news agency Associated Press (AP) in December 2009 and merged the two companies to form DAPD.
On February 1, 2010, the Swiss News Agency (SDA) took over the German DDP text services and the foreign news service of the DDP agency (DAPD) for distribution in Switzerland. In return, DDP received the license to distribute the SDA services in its markets.
DAPD has expanded rapidly in recent years. In May 2011, DAPD took over the press agency Sipa in France. For its part, Sipa joined AP's French-language service in the summer of 2012, including the editorial office in French-speaking Switzerland. Sipa described this as an important step.
The restructuring expert von der Fecht announced that dapd would continue news production as usual during the provisional insolvency proceedings. Customers will receive the usual service with the same scope and quality. (SDA)
