On the same day as Deutsche announced a hefty quarterly loss of €3.1 billion, former employee Sajid Javid was promoted to Chancellor of the Exchequer in the UK
The lesson for the 18,000 Deutsche staff who are expected to lose their jobs in the current restructuring may be that some creative rewriting of their employment history is in order.
Erstwhile colleagues of Javid have noted before how he repositioned himself as a conventional investment banker, rather than highlighting his main role at Deutsche as a credit derivatives structurer with a senior role in a group that developed a reputation for controversial deal-making.
Javid is careful in his current government profile to avoid any demonstrable inaccuracies. He is too sharp to fall into the same trap as fellow minister Andrea Leadsom (the new UK business secretary), who was forced to “revise” her CV while making an ill-starred bid for the Conservative Party leadership in 2016, after she was accused of exaggerating her roles at Barclays and Invesco.
Colleagues of Javid have noted how he repositioned himself as a conventional investment banker, rather than highlighting his main role at Deutsche as a credit derivatives structurer with a senior role in a group that developed a reputation for controversial deal-making
Javid takes the opposite approach, downplaying his involvement in the grittier end of financial services.
