DEAG Won’t Fight Waldbühne Decision

DEAG chief Peter Schwenkow won’t mount a legal challenge to Berlin City Council’s decision to grant a four-year lease on the city’s Waldbühne arena to arch-rival CTS Eventim.

Although reports in papers including Berliner Morgenpost suggested he would take action against the local authority, Schwenkow – who has held the Waldbühne (or forest stage) lease for 27 years – said he’s decided against it.

“You can’t destroy something that you’ve been building up for over 20 years by spending two years having a public argument about it,” he told Pollstar. “I’m confident I would have won but anything that I’d have got would have gone to the lawyers.”

German media said DEAG, which bid for the contract in cahoots with Anschutz Entertainment Group, was challenging the council’s decision because of “procedural errors.”

City interior minister Ehrhart Körting said the contract went to CTS because it made the best offer, but Schwenkow contends the facilities listed in the venue spec included £100,000 worth of equipment that DEAG installed during the latter years of its tenure.

He said the city has agreed to compensate his company for this equipment, which included towers for PA and lights.

The city won’t reveal the value of the individual tenders but both companies are believed to have met the euro 750,000 guarantee the city wants for the 22,000-capacity space. But CTS is believed to have offered the authority a higher percentage of any additional earnings.

Former Berlin mayor Eberhard Diepgen, a Christian Democrat, has expressed concern that the venue – which was built for the 1936 Olympics Games in Berlin but fell into disrepair until the DEAG chief began working it – has changed hands purely for financial reasons.

Some German columnists have suggested the reason is political: Schwenkow, also a Christian Democrat, had the temerity to stand against current mayor, Social Democrat Klaus Wowereit, in the 2006 elections for the Berlin parliament.

The Grunewald district they contested can return three representatives to the city parliament, and both Wowereit and Schwenkow were elected.

Wowereit has been Berlin’s SPD chairman since ’99 and mayor since 2001, when his “coming out” statement prior to that year’s elections –“I am gay, and that’s OK” – became so famous that it was incorporated as part of the party’s Web site address.

“I’ve got five kids and that’s even better,” Schwenkow told Pollstar when asked if he had a similar slogan to rally the people of Berlin in the weeks leading up to the 2006 vote.

Schwenkow is also concerned the contract has gone to a company that has no experience in running a venue, whereas he has two decades of experience working the place and bidding partner AEG is one of the world’s biggest facility managers. AEG operates the city’s O2 World, which opened three weeks ago.

Roth Ermel from the Berlin authority’s press office said Schwenkow’s statement isn’t true but declined to name a venue CTS runs.

Schwenkow said he believes that finding the money to pay for the lease could add between 10 and 12 euros to ticket prices.

Dieter Semmelmann of Semmel Concerts, a CTS promoter with a Berlin office, confirmed the Waldbühne contract was signed Sept. 24, but said it still hasn’t been confirmed which of the CTS operations will run the venue.