The “Corona” crisis: Aluminium Rheinfelden seeks for protective shield proceedings

On 22^nd September’20, Aluminium Rheinfelden has applied for protective shield proceedings; these are preliminary insolvency proceedings with high requirements. This enables viable companies to improve their chances of restructuring. Rheinfelden Alu currently employs 256 staffs.

Aluminium Rheinfelden, as a supplier to the automotive industry, has a history of over 100years, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the firm has to suffer as the vehicle production has been on halt.

Initially, an attempt was made to compensate for the drop in sales with weeks of short-time work, and then the first bad news came in mid-June’20, the axing of 30 jobs. At the same time, company management and the works council said that there should be no redundancies. At that time they were convinced that they could continue to run with around 210 employees.

The leadership of Aluminium company wants to use the protective shield procedure to complete the optimization measures that have already been tackled. The company will continue to be run by the company's management chaired by Erika Zender, the head of the entire company and daughter of Alois Franke. Together with Günter Grimmig, he had bought the sustainable parts of the company from the Alusuisse company when it was about to close down in 1993.

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