Even during this decade there were reports of the group being on the edge of insolvency. His large investments in sports broadcasting rights and in pay television were major reasons. In other countries of Europe pay television could be operated profitably, because there were few freely receivable channels. Many programs also aired on Premiere at the same time that they aired on terrestrial television. This resulted in an investment of some €3 billion for only 2.4 million subscribers. Combined with the fact that many of the packages were more expensive than similar packages available, the decoder was easy to crack, resulting in large amounts of piracy. In 2002 these difficulties came to a head and KirchMedia declared itself insolvent on April 8. Kirch himself withdrew itself from the enterprise, but kept up participation in the Swiss arms on his business, transferring sports broadcasting rights to the subsidiary. The insolvency represents the largest insolvency of an enterprise in German postwar history. The next month Kirch sued Deutsche Bank for €100m, claiming that they had questioned the status of the group and disclosed confidential business information in the process.