Peter Linnert

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Peter Linnert (born 2 December 1934 in Göda) is a German-Austrian economist and entrepreneur. It operates training institutes that also help to obtain academic degrees through cooperation with universities.

Live life
He completed a degree in economics and completed his doctorate in 1964 as Dr. rer. pol. in Hamburg with a thesis on the financing of the enterprises of lecture and performance. He was active as a high school teacher, then habilitated in the field of marketing. Afterwards, he was active as an entrepreneur and taught at several universities.

Activity as an entrepreneur
In the 1970s he owned the White House of Nienstedten and worked as an entrepreneur in various fields. Among them were companies that produced cosmetics, furniture and carpets. In Guatemala, he planned to establish a free trade zone. In 1976, Linnert was arrested because his company was in trouble and he had spread fake stocks. Nothing is known about further entrepreneurial activity, but he is the president of an “Austria-Cyprus Society” founded in 2004.

Training activities
In the mid-1970s, he began to focus on executive training – including seminars on cruise ships. This has been criticized several times as a tightrope between education and the sale of academic titles. For his work at the Faculty of Business and Economic Administration at the Gediminas University of Vilnius, he was awarded an honorary doctorate in 1993. In 1996 he began (nominally coupled with the Vienna University of Economics) to offer part-time seminars “Service Management” at the Vienna University of Economics. Three years later, he converted this into the “Sales Manager Academy (SMA)”, where master’s courses could be completed. His attempts to obtain admission to a private university in Austria failed several times. Since 2006, the “Hoch Warte Study Centre” has been in existence, helping to graduate in cooperation with universities in Bratislava, Warsaw and Belgrade. From 2012 to 2015 he was rector of the German-speaking private university Goethe-Universität Bratislava. Due to the small number of students, the university had to hire established professors from other universities in the "side job" and could not prove enough in-house research and publication activity, so that it was closed. He came into criticism because he was an expert at the Pan-European University Bratislava on the doctoral thesis of his daughter Julia Linnert-Kuhn, which proved to be completely plagiarism. His son Michael Linnert-Kuhn also earned a doctorate here, although doubts about the quality of the work were also expressed.

In 2015, Harald Mahrer awarded him the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art I. Class