After an extraordinary meeting held over the weekend, the two current co-chief executives of criminal banking giant Deutsche Bank, Anshu Jain and Jürgen Fitschen, are stepping down, the bank announced Sunday.
Yet, like their peer Jamie Dimon of criminal bank JP Morgan, the two will have made out like bandits and avoided jail time, despite carrying on a succession of highly illegal acts that caused billions of dollars of damage to average Americans.
Germany’s largest bank appointed John Cryan, 54, to the position of Co-Chief Executive Officer, effective July 1, 2015.
The move follows Deutsche Bank’s latest, but by no means only, agreement less than two months ago to pay $2.5 billion to settle a criminal probe by U.S. and British authorities that it manipulated benchmark interest rates between 2005 and 2009.
Just what Cryan, who has been on the bank’s supervisory board, audit committee and risk committee, will do to change the criminal culture is unclear. He is widely considered to be an insider, and profited just like other senior executive from the criminal schemes perpetrated over the last decade.
“He knows the bank well, and we are convinced that he is the right person at the right time,” said Deutsche Bank supervisory board chairman Paul Achleitner in the bank’s statement.
Cryan was chief financial officer of UBS 2008 to 2011, a period in which that company too engaged in serious criminal misconduct, mostly around tax evasion. That behavior recently netted UBS a multi-billion dollar fine, although the amount is still much less than the illegally gotten profits.
In addition to paying $2.5 billion for Libor rate violations, two weeks ago, Deutsche Bank agreed to a $55 million settlement with the SEC over misstated paper losses of at least $1.5 billion during the great financial crisis.
That agreement followed another settlement in April, in which the company paid $600 million to the New York State Department of Financial Services, $800 million to the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, $775 million to the U.S. Department of Justice, and $340 million to the United Kingdom’s Financial Conduct Authority.
Just like JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, UBS, Barclays and MF Global, among others, Deutsche bank’s settlements beg the question: At what point is running a corrupt bank a criminal offense punishable by a prison sentence?
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