News / Business

Deutsche Bank's co-chiefs resign

Sunday, 07 June 2015 5:51 PM [ Last Update: Sunday, 07 June 2015 5:51 PM ]

Deutsche Bank announced Sunday its co-chief executives are stepping down.

European financial giant Deutsche Bank announced Sunday its co-chief executives are stepping down as the banking group faces a wave of scandals and has failed to meet profit targets this year.

Anshu Jain will resign at the end of June, while Juergen Fitschen plans to stay on in the job until after Deutsche Bank's annual shareholder meeting in May 2016, AFP reported.

Deutsche Bank said it has appointed supervisory board member John Cryan, 54, to take over in July as co-CEO and he will become sole chief executive after Fitschen steps down.

Germany's largest lender is mired in around 6,000 different litigation cases and was last month fined a record $2.5 billion (2.2 billion euros) for its involvement in an interest rate-rigging scandal.

In mid-May, the bank confirmed it had opened an internal probe into its investment division in Russia, with the German press speaking of possible money laundering.

The case reportedly involved some $6 billion in transactions over four years.

The resignations were welcomed by stockholders in Germany, who had blasted the leaders for their performance.

The two CEOs have been in their current positions since 2012 and their contracts were due to run through March 2017, Deutsche Bank said in a statement.

At Deutsche Bank's annual meeting last month the two men faced shareholder wrath over the string of scandals and poor profitability. The bank has so far failed to meet its profit targets for this year, the AFP report added.

Deutsche Bank, which employs a workforce of more than 98,000 and has annual revenues of some 32 billion euros, is torn between its ambitions in investment banking and its historic domestic retail banking network.

Despite substantial efforts to cut costs and diversify, the bank continues to lag behind its Anglo-Saxon rivals.

Net profit slumped to 559 million euros ($608 million) in the first quarter to end-March from from 1.1 billion euros in the same period of 2014 because of litigation costs.

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