As a motley register of institutional shareholders grows restive and bankers row and scrap and blame each other, Christian Sewing must define a plausible mission for the bank. But the case against chairman Paul Achleitner is surely now unanswerable. Can Deutsche Bank ever be credible again while he still sits in the chair?
The recently departed Deutsche banker has been running Euromoney through his own particular experiences of the bitter internal divisions, blame dodging and structural failures of the world’s most dysfunctional global systemically important bank (G-Sib).
It is a conversation Euromoney has had several times since news first broke in late March of what by mid-April had become the worst-managed change of chief executive by a large bank since the financial crisis.
So it is a familiar list.
The Germans hate investment banking, even though it’s their only chance of having a big, powerful, international bank.
“You’d go to meetings of Deutsche Bank’s top MDs and they’d be asking: ‘Why are we even in the US? It’s contributed nothing for 10 years, after you allocate all the fines.
