Oct 20, 2009, 9:56 GMT
Berlin - Thousands of workers face unemployment after bankruptcy administrators decided to close German mail-order company Quelle, a union official said Tuesday.
'It you take everything into consideration, more than 6,000 jobs are at stake,' said Johann Roesch, spokesman for the services industry union Verdi.
Bavarian-based Quelle, which was founded in 1927, has been teetering on the brink of collapse since its parent company, retailer Arcandor, filed for bankruptcy on June 9.
The decision to liquidate the mail-order business was announced on Monday evening after the failure of efforts to find a new buyer.
'After intensive negotiations with a number of investors, the insolvency administrators as well as creditors see no alternative to a liquidation of Quelle Deutschland,' said Arcandor administrator Klaus Huber Georg.
Employees were due to be informed of the decision later Tuesday.
Quelle employs about 10,500 people in Germany. Some 3,000 of them have already left voluntarily or negotiated severance packages.
Quelle was the keystone of Arcandor's web of mail-order and online vendors in 28 nations, employing 20,000 people. Profitable speciality mail order operations such as home-shopping channel HSE 24 were to be sold off separately.
Until the 1989 fall of Communism, Quelle's 1,000-page mail-order catalogues were the bible of clothes and home appliances for East Europeans behind the Iron Curtain.
Most German households own a few low-priced Quelle products. Today, younger Germans perceive Quelle's 70,000 wares as faintly out of date.
The company has been operating since July with the help of 50 million euros (75 million dollars) in government-guaranteed loans.
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