I assume that everybody who has been reading through this site will guess correctly: my recommendation is against it.
It’s not just because of my own bad experience with the Deutsche Bank and one of their partially owned subsidies, Pago. It’s also because the Deutsche Bank, on the top level, lacks in appropriate manners (which can be very costly indeed to a big business client of the Deutsche Bank).
Take this for an example: In February 2002, Rolf Breuer, who was at that time CEO of the Deutsche Bank (and later became the bank’s chairman of the board), declared very publicly in an interview with Bloomberg TV that he doubted the credit-worthiness of one of their own largest clients, the German media czar Leo Kirch. The financial industry took this as a clear signal to withdraw support for the Kirch Group. A few months later, Kirch went bankrupt. And he blames the Deutsche Bank.
Do you want your bank to undermine your consolidation efforts at difficult times by making public your possible financial difficulties? Hardly. Therefore, learn from the Kirch case, and choose your bank carefully.
Leo Kirch, by the way, now does everything he can to get even. He filed a series of court cases against the Deutsche Bank, both in Germany and the US. In one such case, a court in Munich decided that Rolf Breuer violated the bank secrecy law, and that the Deutsche Bank should pay damages. A spokesman of Leo Kirch calculated that the losses suffered by the Kirch Group are in the billion Euro range. However, the German Supreme Court (German: Bundesgerichtshof) has accepted the Munich court ruling for a review (German: Revision), and hasn’t rendered a decision yet at the time of this writing.
But only last month, the Kirchs won another court ruling against the Deutsche Bank. On January 18, 2005, a court in Frankfurt decided in a case filed by Leo Kirch’s wife Ruth that the Deutsche Bank would have to make known the salaries as well as the share holdings of all eleven members of their Group Executive Committee. The court also ruled that the Deutsche Bank would have to comment on the widely circulating information that 200 employees of the Deutsche Bank earn more than CEO Josef Ackerman (according to the German news magazine Der Spiegel 11.1 million Euro in 2003). The questions had initially been posed during a 2004 shareholder meeting, but the bank refused to answer them. After the Frankfurt court ruling, the bank announced that it would appeal to a higher court.
I’d like to do a Leo Kirch in my case (not court case) with Pago. They caused me losses, and they also don’t want to provide information. But I do not have the means, so I certainly won’t. Anyway, one can expect that the Deutsche Bank, and any fully or partially owned subsidy, shall appeal against any court ruling not in their favor, and that they might be willing to go to the highest level. Such cases take years, and cost a lot of money (I don’t even have the funds to bring the matter to a lower court). I can forget about that. I cannot do a Leo Kirch, only a Serge Kreutz, and that means: publish on the Internet.
