Company stakes
Majority and minority holdings in private businesses, blocks in listed ones, carve-outs of a division that no longer fits, and the joint ventures that sit between a sale and a partnership.
Zurich · Since 1998
True independence.
We sell and buy stakes in companies and property on behalf of their owners, put the financing behind those deals, manage real estate for the investors who back us, and build the Swiss structures that hold it all.
Founded 1998
Privately owned
Four business lines
Why it matters
Nobody upstream of us has a product to place. That is the whole point of the firm: when we tell you to walk away from a deal, there is no revenue sitting on the other side of that advice.
01 — Advisory
Selling, buying, and paying for it
A stake changes hands once or twice in the life of a business. We buy for investors and sell for owners — always for one side of the table, never for both. The work is the same either way: who belongs at the other end of it, what the thing is worth, and how to hold a process together long enough for money to move.
Real estate deals
One building or a whole portfolio — including the awkward cases where the capital structure has to be rebuilt before the asset can be sold at all.
Financing
Money for a purchase, a growth step, a shareholder who wants out, or a balance sheet under strain. Banks, debt funds, insurers and private capital, in whatever mix the situation will carry.
Speaking for shareholders
Sometimes a group of investors needs one voice in front of the board. We take that role, and we read the accounts without flattering the people who wrote them.
+ See how a mandate runs
Sell-side
Selling a business or a stake
Selling well is mostly preparation. Before anyone is approached we go through the numbers, the contracts and the dependencies the way a buyer's advisers will, and we say plainly what they are going to find. Surprises discovered late cost more than problems disclosed early.
Then we build the buyer list — trade, financial, and the ones nobody in the sector thinks of — and run a process tight enough to create competition without letting word spread through the market. Carve-outs and spin-offs work the same way, with the added job of deciding where the line through the business should be drawn.
Buy-side
Buying
On the buying side the hard part is discipline. We look for targets that fit a stated strategy rather than ones that happen to be for sale, work out what the asset is worth to you specifically, and set the price above which walking away is the better outcome.
We handle the approach, the structure and the negotiation through to signing, and coordinate the lawyers, auditors and technical advisers so the process does not stall between them. The same applies to joint ventures, where the shareholders' agreement matters more than the price.
Property
Real estate transactions
Because we also manage property, we underwrite a building the way an owner does rather than the way a broker does — rent roll, lease expiries, capital expenditure that has been deferred, and what the asset needs to become worth more to someone else.
A good number of these cases arrive with a capital structure that no longer fits the asset. Recapitalising before selling usually recovers more than selling into the problem, and we will say so even when it delays the fee.
Financing
Arranging the money
Acquisitions, growth steps, shareholder replacements, project development, recapitalisations and balance sheets under strain. Sources run from house banks and foreign lenders to debt funds, insurers, family capital and hybrid instruments sitting between debt and equity.
Our job is to know which lender is currently active in a given asset class and country, what they will actually approve as opposed to what their term sheet says, and how the pieces fit into a structure the borrower can live with for its whole term.
How it runs
A mandate, start to finish
Every deal differs, but the order rarely does. Knowing which step you are on is half of keeping a process calm.
- 01
First conversation
Off the record and free. What you own, what you want to happen, and whether we are the right firm for it. Some of these end with us recommending you do nothing this year.
- 02
Assessment and mandate
A written view of value, structure and the likely counterparties, with scope, timetable and fees agreed before work begins.
- 03
Preparation
Documentation, financial model, and the answers to the questions the other side will ask. Weaknesses are dealt with in the story rather than discovered later in diligence.
- 04
Approach and negotiation
Counterparties contacted in a controlled order, offers compared on terms as well as price, and the shortlist narrowed to those who can genuinely fund and close.
- 05
Diligence to closing
We chair the process, keep the advisers moving, and hold the commercial line through the late renegotiation attempts that almost always come. You hear from us at every turn, including the ones that go badly.
Fees. Agreed in writing at the start — a fixed retainer for work that happens regardless of outcome, and a success fee tied to what is actually achieved. No commissions from any third party.
02 — Asset management
Buildings held, not flipped
We manage property for pension funds, family offices and private investors, usually alongside an operator who knows the street better than anyone sitting in Zurich does. Germany, Switzerland and Austria.
Repair and reposition
We fund 50 to 90 percent of the equity next to a local operator and buy assets with something wrong that can be put right: a weak tenant, a tired building, a roof doing nothing, a floor nobody ever built.
Operating businesses
Equity into companies that run property rather than merely own it, where the underlying real estate is sound and a name can be built on top of it.
Held for income
Buildings bought to be kept. Long leases, good covenants, and financing arranged so the income still works in year ten, not only in year one.
What we look at
Offices, shops, light industrial and logistics, apartments — and further out, data centres, farmland, energy plants, clinics and leisure sites.
+ See how we invest
The bet
What we are actually buying
Good returns in property come from fixing something specific about a specific building, not from waiting for a market to rise. We buy problems we know how to solve.
The fault is usually one of four things: a tenant mix that will not survive the next renewal cycle, a building that has been under-spent for a decade, unused floor area or air rights, or income that was never collected at all — rooftop solar, telecoms, parking, advertising surface. Several arrive distressed, either because the seller must sell or because the debt needs replacing before anything else can happen.
Operating businesses
Some property is really a business with a building attached. Where the operation creates the value, we take equity in the company rather than only the asset — student housing, senior living, low-cost hotels, data centres. The test is whether the platform would still be worth something to a buyer separately from the bricks.
Held for income
Assets acquired to be kept: quality locations, long leases, tenants who will still be there at renewal. The work here is financial rather than physical — structuring debt, amortisation and reserves so the distribution holds steady across the whole holding period instead of peaking early. This is where most of our institutional capital sits, and it is deliberately the least eventful thing we do.
Partners
Who we invest with, and who invests with us
Operators with a track record in one region and one asset type, their own capital in the deal, and the willingness to be measured against a plan agreed at the start.
On the other side: pension funds and other institutions, family offices, and private investors who qualify as professional. Reporting is quarterly, plain, and includes the things that went wrong. Beyond investing, we handle the ongoing management and administration of the assets we advise on, so ownership stays one relationship rather than four.
03 — Fiduciary
What you own, and how you own it
Wertplan Fiduciary forms Swiss companies and then runs them — banking, accounts, controlling, credit lines, tax returns — and advises on the ownership structure sitting above them. Two families can hold the same assets and face entirely different outcomes at a succession. The difference is never the asset. It is the structure it sits in.
You own it, we administer it
Bank accounts, shares, deeds and metal are all held in the name of the client or the client's own company. We are not trustees, we hold no client assets and we take no discretionary powers.
Swiss companies
Incorporation of an AG or GmbH through to a working bank account — including the account file, which is where most foreign founders are refused rather than for anything to do with the applicant.
Accounts and controlling
Bookkeeping, VAT, payroll, statutory accounts and tax returns, plus budgets, liquidity planning and reporting — and credit lines arranged with banks that already know the file.
Precious metals
Advice on buying gold, silver and platinum sensibly, and holding it in independent Swiss vaults outside the banking system — allocated, registered in your name, and accessible only by you.
+ More on fiduciary services
Before anything else
You keep the controls
Everything stays in the client's name. Nothing is bought, sold, moved or signed on our own authority. We prepare, we recommend, and you decide. This is not a limitation we work around — it is the arrangement we prefer, because nobody stands between you and your own property and there is no scenario in which our position and yours come apart.
Where a structure genuinely calls for a trustee or a foundation council, that role is filled by a licensed third party you appoint directly, not by us wearing another hat. We receive no commission, retrocession or referral fee from any bank, vault, insurer or product provider.
Setting up
Swiss companies, from nothing to operating
We form the company — usually an AG or a GmbH, depending on what it has to do and who has to see it — and take it through the steps that sink most foreign founders: notarisation, capital payment, commercial register entry, domicile, and the board and signature arrangements the law requires.
Then the bank account, which is the part people underestimate. Swiss banks decline more applications than they approve, and they decline on the file rather than on the person. We prepare the file properly — beneficial ownership, source of funds, business rationale — and take it to the institution most likely to say yes to that particular profile, rather than to whichever bank happens to be nearest.
The work that repeats every month
Bookkeeping, VAT, payroll and social insurance, statutory annual accounts and the audit relationship where one is needed. Budgets, forecasts, liquidity planning and management reporting, so the owner sees what the business is doing between annual accounts rather than eleven months after the fact. Working capital facilities, guarantees and lombard lines arranged with banks that already understand the structure. Corporate and, where we act for the family too, personal tax declarations.
Structures
Holding it so it survives the next generation
Wealth rarely fails because the assets were wrong. It fails at the handover: an estate that has to be broken up to be divided, a family company with no agreement on who runs it, heirs in four jurisdictions with four sets of tax consequences, or a personal claim that reaches straight through to everything because nothing sat behind anything.
We advise on which vehicles answer which of those problems — holding and operating companies, family holding arrangements, and the shareholder agreements that decide what actually happens when someone dies, divorces or wants out. Where a foundation or a trust is genuinely the right answer, we say so, explain what it would and would not achieve, and help you appoint a licensed trustee to hold that role. We have no interest in recommending a vehicle whose administration we would then be paid for.
We are administrators and advisers, not your lawyers, your tax counsel or your trustee. On anything turning on law or on a tax ruling we bring in the specialist and coordinate them — and we tell you when a structure being proposed to you is more elaborate than your situation warrants, which is more often than the people selling those structures will admit.
Metals
Precious metals, held outside the banking system
For clients who want a portion of their wealth held in physical form, we advise on the purchase of gold, silver, platinum and palladium — what to buy, in which bar sizes and refinery brands, and at what spread, since the difference between a good and a careless purchase is measured in percent rather than basis points.
The distinction that matters in storage is legal rather than physical: metal held in a bank's own vault can form part of that bank's estate in an insolvency if it was not properly segregated, whereas metal in an independent vault is held as your property, in allocated and individually identified form. The storage contract is between you and the vault operator, the metal is registered in your name, and access rights are yours. We arrange it; we do not hold it — we have no key, no signature and no ability to move a single bar.
How it works
Starting a fiduciary relationship
- 01
The situation
What you own, where you and your family are resident, who is meant to end up with what, and what you are actually worried about. Structures designed without this conversation are the ones that have to be unwound later.
- 02
Acceptance
Identification of the beneficial owners and the source of funds. Swiss law requires it of us and banks require it of the company; a file assembled properly now saves months later.
- 03
Proposal
A written structure with the reasoning, the running costs and the tax treatment set out — reviewed with your lawyer and tax adviser before anything is incorporated. You approve it, or you don't; nothing proceeds on our judgement alone.
- 04
Implementation
Formation, registration, banking, and the transfer of assets into the structure in the right order, which is not always the obvious one.
- 05
Administration
The recurring work on a fixed annual fee agreed in advance: accounts, controlling, filings, correspondence with banks and authorities, and a yearly review of whether the structure still fits the family it was built for.
Fees. Formation is quoted as a fixed price. Administration runs on a fixed annual fee by scope rather than by the hour, so that asking us a question does not generate an invoice.
A separate practice
Gulf market advisory
This has nothing to do with our Swiss business and we keep it that way. It exists because two halves of the same problem kept arriving at the door — companies who want to operate in the Gulf, and Gulf groups who want partners from outside it.
Coming in →
Setting up in the Gulf
For companies opening in Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and the neighbouring states. What the market actually looks like, which entity to register, what licence it needs, and who to sit down with once it exists.
← Going out
Finding partners abroad
For Gulf conglomerates, family groups and government bodies looking outward for a venture partner — someone with the technology, the operating record or the balance sheet to make the thing work.
- Industry & manufacturing
- Entertainment & leisure
- Healthcare
- Digital infrastructure
+ More on the Gulf practice
Coming in
Establishing a presence
The mistake companies make in the Gulf is treating market entry as a legal exercise. The registration is the easy part. What decides whether the venture works is which counterparty you attach yourself to, what they expect in return, and whether your business model survives contact with how procurement actually happens there.
We work through that in order: an honest read of the opportunity and the competition already sitting in it, the choice of jurisdiction and entity, the licences the activity requires, the search for a local partner where one is needed, and the introductions once there is something concrete to introduce. Then we stay through the first negotiations, because that is where foreign management most often misreads the room.
Going out
Bringing partners in
Gulf business groups and public entities are looking for foreign partners with something they cannot simply hire: proven technology, an operating record at scale, or the balance sheet to carry a large project alongside them.
We define what the partner actually has to be capable of, search Europe and beyond against that definition rather than against a list of famous names, approach candidates discreetly, and put the opportunity to them in terms a board outside the region will understand. Then we help structure the venture — ownership, governance, technology transfer, exit — so both sides can live with it in year five.
Sectors
Where we are useful
Industry and manufacturing. Localisation of production, joint ventures with technology transfer, and the supply chains being built around new industrial cities.
Entertainment and leisure. Venues, attractions, events and hospitality — operators and content owners paired with the groups and authorities financing the sector's build-out.
Healthcare. Hospital and clinic operators, specialist care, medical technology and training partnerships between foreign providers and local groups.
Digital infrastructure. Data centres, connectivity, cloud, and the power and cooling questions that decide whether any of it can actually be built.
Terms. Engagements run on a retainer with defined milestones and a success fee where a venture actually comes together. We act for one side of an introduction, never both, and this practice is kept operationally separate from everything above.
The firm
Since 1998, owned by the people in it
Wertplan was founded in Switzerland in 1998 as an advisory practice and has stayed in private hands ever since. It grew the slow way — one mandate, one operating partner, one investor at a time — and the network behind it is the accumulated result of that rather than of any acquisition.
That history explains how we behave now. Relationships that took twenty-five years to build are not worth a single badly chosen transaction, which is why we turn down more work than we take and why we will tell a client to do nothing when nothing is the right answer.
What to expect from us
The people you meet are the people who do the work. There is no second team behind the first one and no junior sent to the meetings that matter.
We are paid by you and by nobody else. No commissions, retrocessions or referral fees from banks, lenders, vaults, insurers or product providers. Fees are agreed in writing before work starts.
You hear the bad news first. A process that is going wrong is worth more to you as an early warning than as a polished quarterly update.
We see transactions that are never marketed. A good part of what reaches us comes through relationships built over thirty years — to principals, family holdings, industrial owners, operators and sponsors — rather than through a process someone else is running.
Discretion is the default. We do not publish client names or transaction lists, and we do not use one client's business as a reference to win another's.
People
Who you would be working with
Five people, and no layer between you and any of them.
Jens Friedländer
Chairman of the Supervisory Board
A lifelong entrepreneur who has built and run businesses in real estate development, hospitality, shipping and tourism.
He brings the owner's perspective to the board — the view of someone who has carried the risk himself rather than advised on it, and a long-established network across German industry and public institutions.
Those decades also produce an unusual flow of transactions that never reach the market. He knows most of the large corporate tenants and hotel operators personally — the relationships that decide whether a building is let before it is bought.
Akram Khattab
Chief Executive Officer · Supervisory Board
Advisory · Asset Management · Gulf
Trained as a business economist and a dealmaker by profession, with more than thirty years advising principals and institutions across Europe and the Gulf at Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, Mashreq Bank and the Faisal Group.
He has built two investment platforms from a blank page and established the single-family office of a senior member of a GCC ruling family. He leads the advisory, asset management and Gulf practices, and is among the few senior European professionals with a hands-on record in Sharia-compliant investment going back to the industry's formative years.
Birte Friedländer
Head of Tourism & Hospitality · Gastronomy · Corporate Communications
Decades in corporate communications at large German companies — the work of deciding how a business speaks in public, and what it is better off not saying.
She has also long run the group's own tourism, hotel and restaurant holdings. These are businesses she is accountable for rather than advises on, which changes how she reads someone else's.
Martin Ronchi
Head of Fiduciary
Founder and head of Buenaventuras AG in Baar, a fiduciary practice whose specialists have spent thirty-five years on the books, payroll, tax and administration of owner-managed companies — with sector depth in trade, industry, production, services and insurance, for corporates and SMEs alike.
He rebuilt the traditional fiduciary workflow around digital tools well before the industry moved: more than twenty-five Abacus implementations delivered, cloud accounting adopted early, and database work deep enough to turn a client's own data into analysis they can actually use.
Johanna Ronchi
Associate · Fiduciary
Payroll, tax accounting and general accounting — the recurring work that decides whether a company stays in good standing, filed correctly and on time.
Many years in Swiss fiduciary practice, working directly with the owners and finance staff of the companies she looks after.
Behind the five stands a settled network of operating partners and specialists, built up over years and brought in mandate by mandate: operators on the ground, lawyers, tax and construction experts, analysts.
Bahnhofplatz 4 · Zürich
Office
Wertplan Holding AG
Bahnhofplatz 4
8001 Zürich, Switzerland
Enquiries
Mandates
First conversations are held in confidence, before anything is written down, and cost nothing.
Legal
Imprint and privacy
+ Imprint & terms of use
Wertplan Holding AG
Bahnhofplatz 4, 8001 Zürich, Switzerland · +41 44 324 01 08
· info@wertplan.ch
Registered seat: Celerina/Schlarigna GR · Office: Zürich
Commercial register: UID CHE-103.353.180
Responsible for content: Wertplan Holding AG
Supervisory status
Wertplan Holding AG provides advisory services only and is not subject to prudential supervision. It is not a bank or a securities firm, not a portfolio manager and not a trustee within the meaning of the Financial Institutions Act, and it holds no licence from the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority FINMA.
The firm does not act as a trustee, does not hold client assets in custody, and accepts no discretionary powers over client assets. Assets remain in the ownership of the client or the client's own company throughout, and every transaction is executed on the client's instruction.
Terms of use
No offer, no advice. This website is published for general information. Nothing on it constitutes an offer, an invitation, a recommendation or advice to buy, sell or hold any financial instrument, security, participation or property. Advice is given only under a signed mandate, to the client named in it.
No performance promise. Descriptions of past transactions or investment approaches are illustrative. Past results do not indicate future results, and every investment carries the risk of loss, including total loss.
Who this is for. The information here is directed at persons in Switzerland and is not intended for use in any jurisdiction where its publication would be unlawful or require registration.
Accuracy, links and copyright. We prepare the content with care but give no warranty that it is complete, current or free of error. We accept no responsibility for external sites. Text, layout and marks belong to Wertplan Holding AG; reproduction requires our written consent.
Governing law. Swiss law applies; place of jurisdiction is Zürich, to the extent permitted by law.
+ Privacy notice
When you read this site
No cookies are set, no analytics or tracking scripts run, and nothing is loaded from anyone else's server — fonts, maps and videos included. That is why you are not being asked to consent to anything. Our hosting provider records standard server log data — IP address, time, page requested, browser — to operate the site securely and diagnose faults. These logs serve that purpose only, are deleted at regular intervals, and are not combined with any other information.
This website is hosted by STRATO AG, Pascalstrasse 10, 10587 Berlin, Germany, on servers located in Germany. STRATO processes this data solely on our instruction, under a data processing agreement. Switzerland recognises the European Economic Area as providing adequate protection, so no further safeguards are required for this transfer.
When you write or call
We process what you send — name, contact details and what you tell us about your situation — in order to answer you and, if it goes further, to assess and carry out a mandate. Correspondence is kept while the matter is live and afterwards for the retention periods Swiss commercial and anti-money-laundering law imposes, generally ten years. Email is not confidential in transit; say so and we will arrange a secure channel.
Who else sees it
We do not sell personal data and do not pass it to anyone for their own marketing. Within a mandate, data may be shared with the parties the mandate requires — counterparties and their advisers, lawyers, auditors, banks, financing and operating partners — and only to the extent the work needs it. Where a mandate involves parties outside Switzerland or the EEA, transfers are made under appropriate safeguards such as standard contractual clauses.
Your rights
Under the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection, and the GDPR where it applies to you, you may ask for a copy of the data we hold, ask us to correct or delete it, restrict or object to processing, and receive it in portable form. Write to privacy@wertplan.ch and we will answer within 30 days. Some records we are obliged to keep regardless, and we will tell you where that applies. Complaints may go to the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner in Bern or, in the EU, to your national supervisory authority.
Controller: Wertplan Holding AG, Bahnhofplatz 4, 8001 Zürich. Last updated August 2026.