Zilkens' News Blog

Zilkens' News Blog 51 2023 - the last one this year

Christmas Eve will be over in a week's time and hopefully you have had a great Christmas.

2023 was a mixed year in many respects: the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine is experiencing its second turn of the year and the supporters of freedom are tiring of selfish motives. Hamas' bloody attack on Israel opens our eyes to Islamist-induced anti-Semitism, which has been dormant in Western European societies for years and is deliberately overlooked so as not to jeopardise integration that is not taking place. Inflation is driving people and changing consumer behaviour. The German government regards the citizen as a cash cow and refuses to respond to the judgement of the judges in Karlsruhe with austerity measures. For example, there is an extension to the Chancellery, which is planned to cost EUR 600 million and will probably cost more than EUR 1 billion to realise, which nobody needs except a 1.70 m tall chancellor. There would also be considerable savings to be made on the personnel of the federal administration and other public administrations if one bureaucratic monster after another were not created out of pure self-preservation. Self-preservation doesn't just apply to individual countries, but also to Europe and its parliaments, some of which, in a hyper-control mania, believe they have to impose regulations on everything and everyone. One example - the nice DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act), which is now being brought to life in order to unfold its full force from 17 January 2025. The supervisory authorities are delighted, they need more staff. The regulation aims to strengthen the IT security of financial companies. To achieve this goal, DORA lays down standardised requirements for all affected companies with regard to the security of networks and information systems. This also includes insurance companies and the intermediaries and insurance brokers who work with them - including us. The requirements set by DORA are specified in more detail in so-called regulatory and implementing technical standards (RTS/ITS) and guidelines by the European Supervisory Authorities (ESAs). These standards will be put out for public consultation in advance. The first consultations have already been completed. The smaller companies - i.e. the backbone of the German economy - have not noticed any of this. Whether they will ever be able to do so is questionable, as all the bureaucratisation causes costs for small companies in particular, which they cannot pass on to their customers. This is annoying for large companies but life-threatening for small ones - which makes us wonder about the increasing disenchantment with politics.

For us, 2023 has been a good year so far, in which we have been pleased to welcome many new customers. Our team has also grown. This year, Birgit Jakubek from Galerie Holtmann and Andreas Cappenberg from Catawiki joined us to ensure the satisfaction of our customers and to systematise some processes. In addition to these two, Claudia Teichner, Clarissa Möhrl, Gina Labetzsch, Kristel Sarfatti, Perihan Poplata and Birgitt Haffmann look after our customers in all matters relating to insurance. Even though we still have two weeks to go, I would like to take this opportunity to publicly thank the whole team for their hard work. Our Christmas donation this year will go to ART ASYL e.V., which provided us with excellent support last year for the "Worth Fighting For" exhibition, and to the Mendelssohn Society in Berlin. "I am waking " (over the assets of the customers) was the motto of the Mendelssohn bank, to which we therefore feel connected.

We know from previous years that few people are interested in receiving annotated reports between Christmas and the first week of January. The next Newsblog and the next Art Week by Stefan Kobel will be published on 8 January of the new year.

We wish you all a Merry Christmas and peace, happiness, health and success in the New Year

Stephan Zilkens and the team at Zilkens Fine Art Insurance Broker GmbH in Solothurn and Cologne