Rock & More Tanks Again

The second version of promoting company Rock & More has tanked within 15 months of the first going under, although Wolfgang Klinger, Heimo Hanserl and Christian Dorrer had already severed their connections with the company.

Last May Hanserl, who owned Rock & More Beteilegunts (or Rock & More 2) sold it to Lavinia, which Dorrer described as a Dutch investment company.

At the end of January, Klinger and Dorrer both told Pollstar that they were quitting to work together on new projects. They also said the now Dutch-owned Rock & More 2 was in financial trouble and had no shows in the diary. The company officially filed for bankruptcy at the Handelsgericht Wien, Vienna’s financial court, on February 5.

In October 2006, Rock & More Veranstaltungs (or Rock & More 1) had filed for bankruptcy in the same court with losses estimated to be in the region of euro 1.8 million. It had assets of about euro 120,000.

However, 10 months earlier, Hanserl had sold Rock & More 1 and it had changed its name to MT Veranstaltungs, the company title that appeared on the Handelsgericht documentation.

Dr. Susi Pariasek of Pariasek-Holper Rechtsanwälte, the Vienna-based insolvency practitioners charged with winding up Rock & More 1’s affairs, has never been happy with the business moves that led to the company going bankrupt while its owners and operatives appeared to have already set up another company with almost the same name to replace it.

In December 2006 she laid sufficient evidence before the Handelsgericht Wien to get the first company’s bankruptcy proceedings stopped to give the Vienna state attorney time to investigate the situation.

She said she believed there was sufficient evidence to connect the original bankrupt Rock & More with the new one, even to the degree that the latter was responsible for some of the former’s debts.

She also said she felt the bankrupt company had been sold off as a shell as soon as it was known that it was in trouble, and the change of name to MT Veranstaltungs was merely to avoid the name Rock & More being dragged through the Viennese bankruptcy court.

She supported these views by pointing out that the second company was being run by the same people who ran the first, most of the staff was the same, and it was trading out of the same office address and with all the same contact points.

Although Klinger says he wasn’t a shareholder in either company and isn’t involved in the bankruptcies as he acted only as a consultant, Pariasek disputes this and says he had the power to make offers for acts on behalf of Rock & More 1 and 2 and also execute the business, claiming that they’re roles that are far wider than those usually performed by consultants.

At press time it wasn’t possible to contact Pariasek on how her efforts to link the bankrupt Rock & More 1 with Rock & More 2 will be affected now that the second company has also gone bust.