Bilfinger Berger - Politics and still under construction...

Beer opener: part of the portfolio since 2014… (Yes, Roland Koch was CEO at the time!)

Some companies hire a politician for his network. Bilfinger hired one to run the whole place. In March 2011 Roland Koch – for more than eleven years the combative CDU Minister-President of Hesse – joined the Mannheim-based group's executive board, and on 1 July 2011 he succeeded long-serving CEO Herbert Bodner at the top. A career in the Wiesbaden state chancellery is, as everybody knows, the perfect preparation for pipe racks, refinery maintenance and fixed-price contracts.

The company he took over was itself in the middle of a costume change. Bilfinger + Berger, born in 1975 from the merger of two old-school builders, had become Bilfinger Berger in 2001 and simply Bilfinger in 2012. The story told to investors: away from cyclical, low-margin construction, towards steady, higher-margin industrial and building services. Concrete out, engineering hours in.

Unfortunately the past kept showing up uninvited. In December 2013 Bilfinger agreed to pay a USD 32 million penalty to the US Department of Justice to resolve Foreign Corrupt Practices Act charges over bribes paid in Nigeria between 2003 and 2005 in connection with a gas pipeline project – and accepted an external compliance monitor, who would stay until the end of 2018. Not exactly the kind of independent supervisory body a German board enjoys.

Then the present arrived as well. In 2014 the services story stopped delivering: after a first cut in June, Bilfinger issued its second profit warning in August, and Koch stepped down, taking responsibility for the warnings and citing disagreements with the supervisory board about what to do next. Bodner returned as interim chief – the political equivalent of calling back the previous government.

What followed was a decade-long renovation. The civil engineering business went to Implenia, the building and facility unit was sold to EQT in 2016 for about €1.2bn (today Apleona), and the CEO's office turned into a revolving door. In 2018 the supervisory board decided to claim damages from all executive board members who had served between 2006 and 2015, over alleged compliance failures and value-destroying deals. The ending was very German and very civilised: in March 2020 Bilfinger settled for €16.75 million (€18.2 million including waived pay claims) – paid by the D&O insurance, not out of the former managers' own pockets. According to his spokesman, Koch did not have to contribute personally.

And today? The renovation is, remarkably, almost finished. Bilfinger is a pure industrial services group listed in the MDAX; under CEO Thomas Schulz it reported 2025 revenue of about €5.4bn and an EBITA margin of 5.5 % – financial targets met. Roland Koch, meanwhile, became a professor of management practice at the Frankfurt School and chairman of the Ludwig-Erhard-Stiftung. Both parties, it seems, landed well – only the shareholders of 2014 had to open a few bottles to cope.

Museum note: of all the tools Bilfinger ever handed out, the beer opener is the only one that never needed a restructuring.

Have a better Bilfinger souvenir or a story from the inside? Get in touch via the contact page.

Further reading

• WirtschaftsWoche – Bilfinger erhält 16,75 Millionen Euro von Ex-Vorständen um Roland Koch (2020)
• Construction Enquirer – Bilfinger boss quits after second profit warning (2014)
• US Department of Justice – Bilfinger resolves Foreign Corrupt Practices Act charges (2013)
• Wikipedia – Bilfinger
• Wikipedia (DE) – Roland Koch
• Produktion – Bilfinger steigert Profitabilität 2025 deutlich (2026)