„I won’t celebrate my 80th birthday,“ says Heinz Schimmelbusch in his office in a villa on Liebigstrasse in Frankfurt’s Westend. „My wife wanted to. But the speeches would all be so oriented towards the past. I don’t want that.“ So there was no party on 15 July.

Instead there is a comeback to celebrate. It took a while. But a little more than 30 years after the bankruptcy of the metals company and his hasty departure from Frankfurt, the conglomerate's former CEO – nicknamed „Schibu“ – has rebuilt the old industrial group. The proportions are that of a toy racing car compared to a genuine sports car. The fundamentals are, however, the same again. An integrated metals and recycling group. It's called AMG Critical Materials, and the name differs from the old MG by just one letter. The small company, of which Schimmelbusch serves as chairman and CEO, is listed on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, and has its headquarters in Pennsylvania. The core business with almost 1,000 of the 3,600 employees, is based in Hanau. Everything revolves around the extraction, processing and recycling of battery raw materials lithium and vanadium– and more recently also the recycling of fuel rods.

Brick by brick, Schimmelbusch has, over the past 30 years, at least for himself and at least partially, rebuilt what had collapsed back then. When a massive imbalance arose in Metallgesellschaft's oil futures transactions in 1993, the billions in losses from the sale of the contracts, together with the debts from the acquisition spree of the conglomerate with 62,000 employees, contributed to the acute threat of insolvency. Deutsche Bank wanted to blame Schimmelbusch for this, who in turn still sees the then MG supervisory board chairman Ronaldo Schmitz of Deutsche Bank responsible for forcing him to sell the contracts.

Schimmelbusch had to hand over his management position to administration specialist Kajo Neukirchen. He first fled to New York, and then sought shelter with his mother in Vienna. It was only after three years that he returned to Germany, to settle with Deutsche Bank's lawyers based on 900 pages of files. „The settlement ultimately only took half an hour. Then, they dropped all 25 charges. Up until then, they had only vilified me, but had not given any opportunity for clarification,“ says Schimmelbusch.

That was the past, and now comes the future: In September, AMG will open the first refinery for battery-compatible lithium in Europe, which so far has mainly come from China. In Saxony, AMG is pushing ahead with the development of the Zinnwald project – probably the largest lithium deposit in Europe.

For the year 2024, Schimmelbusch, who is expected to lead the AMG Group for another year, and lives mainly in the USA, told investors at the Capital Markets Day in March 2023 an Ebitda operating profit of 500 million dollars was anticipated, on turnover of 1.7 billion dollars. In fact, it will probably only be 130 million dollars, because lithium prices have fallen by 80% since then, and that has also caused the AMG price to fall sharply. The market capitalisation of the group, in which Schimmelbusch holds less than 5% of the shares, has halved to 500 million euros within twelve months.

How does Schimmelbusch's position as Chairman and CEO of the AMG Group fit in with his age? „Of course I think about what happens with age,“ admits Schimmelbusch. „There is a succession structure. We have prepared this. A younger person will be able to replace me.“ AMG reappointed Schimmelbusch in May 2023 for a term of two years.

On his 40th birthday, Schimmelbusch, as a board member, received a particularly warm congratulations from Metallgesellschaft's supervisory board chairman Wilfried Guth. The bank manager and nephew of Ludwig Erhard, and at the same time chairman of the supervisory board of Deutsche Bank, wished the young MG boss „happiness, health and satisfaction from your work“ in a letter dated July 13, 1984.

For his 50th birthday, Schimmelbusch was on the run, so to speak, but celebrated a lavish party at the Philadelphia Art Museum. He let his 60th birthday pass without celebrating. The 70th birthday was duly celebrated again in the Villa Bonn, a Wilhelminian-style palace in Frankfurt's Westend. He is once again leaving his 80th birthday uncelebrated in public. That means a particularly big party will be needed for his 90th birthday.