Kronospan
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| Private | |
| Industry | Wood, manufacturing |
| Founded | 1897 |
| Products | Processed wood |
| Revenue | €4 billion (2015) |
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Number of employees
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14,000 (2016) |
| Website | http://www.kronospan-worldwide.com |
Kronospan is an international company that manufactures and distributes wood-based panels which are used in applications including flooring, furniture and timber-framed houses.
The company manufactures particleboard, medium density fibreboard, laminate flooring, resins for wood-based panels and oriented strand board. It also produces melamine-faced panels, post-formed worktops, wall panels, window boards, lacquered HDF and others and speciality and decorative paper.
Kronospan was established in 1897 in Lungötz, Austria, as a family business. In 1972 the company opened a UK manufacturing unit in the former coal mining town of Chirk, North Wales. It is now one of the top 10 manufacturing companies in Wales and employs more than 600 people with 90% of the workforce living within a 10-mile radius of the Chirk site.
Kronospan has operations in 31 countries:
In 2002 Kronospan was investigated for tax evasion in Germany. In August 2002, Burkhard Dannewald, the senior prosecutor for Bielefeld, issued an arrest warrant for Peter Kaindl, the managing director and co-owner of Kronospan, relating to 27 counts of tax evasion in the sum of €20-25 million. As an Austrian national, Kaindl could not be extradited to Germany on tax matters, but voluntarily subjected himself for prosecution. The charges related to "payments for allegedly useless patents which falsely reduced the profits of the company between 1998 and 2001." Kaindl and 2 other Kronospan employees admitted the offences at Paderborn district court. He was sentenced to 2 years imprisonment, suspended for 3 years, and fined €5 million. Ingo Leiner, executive director of Kronospan GmbH and Kronospan Flooring GmbH, received 17 months probation, and Rainer Barbier, the company's tax consultant and lawyer, received 18 months probation. It was reported that the "lenient sentences reflected the paying back of taxes owed to the authorities by the parties."
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Wikipedia