Peter Schaider has had enough: The owner of the Auhofcenter made headlines earlier in the corona pandemic, when the trained hairdresser helped trigger the still raging legal dispute over outstanding rents (he lost in a dispute against a tanning studio he rented in the Auhofcenter, which was due to the corona payments was due, note).
This dispute is still more relevant than ever – not least because the last lockdown last December once again robbed retailers and shopping center operators like Schaider of a lot of money. A lockdown that, according to Peter Schaider, “would not have been necessary”, as he explains in a recent interview with the “Standard”, and which did not mince his words in the further course of the conversation with the daily newspaper. Above all, he is against the policy of the federal government and appeals to his industry colleagues to get together and take the republic to court in a joint “process avalanche”.
“The crisis set us back two years. I don’t know of any shopping center that has invested money,” says Peter Schaider. It is clear that the lockdowns were “anything but funny” – neither for operators like him nor for dealers and service providers – but for the Auhofcenter boss many bankruptcies were “homemade”: “The weak get it at the beginning. If you’re hit, you fall over after a harder hit,” explains Schaider.
When asked if some of the restrictions put in place by the federal government were too harsh, he replies: “You have to understand the politics because two-thirds of the population were protected by the vaccine but had no benefits. Nevertheless, it cannot be that retail and gastronomy are the losers. In my opinion, the last lockdown was not necessary. It was a political game that loses politics. It will take years to ramp everything up.”
