In another reminder that the turmoil shaking up Deutsche Bank is not limited to its stock price, but stretches as far as its top decisionmakers, overnight the bank’s consumer banking chief and member of its 10-member management board, Christian Sewing, told Bild that the German bank’s board should discuss scrapping bonuses for top executives for a second year after Germany’s largest bank put dividend payments on hold.
“It’s clear that if we don’t pay our shareholders a dividend, then our own bonus needs to be up for debate as well,” Sewing told Bild-Zeitung in an interview.
Sewing, who leads the private, wealth and commercial clients unit, stood to earn a 2.4 million-euro ($2.7 million) salary and as much as 5.9 million euros in bonuses for this year, the company said in March. While CEO Cryan’s theoretical “maximum” compensation under the bank’s formula is 12.5 million euros, he can’t actually receive that amount, as pay for management board members was capped to 9.85 million euros for 2016. According to Bloomberg, a spokeswoman for the Frankfurt-based bank said the comments were reported accurately.
In an aggressive attempt to delever Europe’s biggest, and the world’s most systemically risky bank, Deutsche Bank CEO John Cryan has been selling risky assets, unwinding trillions in CDS and eliminating thousands of jobs to bolster capital buffers and boost profitability, hurt by mounting legal costs and tougher regulation. The CEO scrapped bonus awards for top management and suspended dividends after the lender posted its first annual loss since 2008 last year.
However, while earnings have been crashing, and the company has lost about 44 percent of its market value this year, Cryan has signaled that there’s no immediate need to raise capital. “The question of a capital increase isn’t an issue at the moment,” Sewing, 45, told Bild-Zeitung. “The share price is very low but our aim is to return the bank to profitability in the long term. That would also boost the share price.”
Because Deutsche Bank has cut assets, built up equity and liquidity since the financial crisis, “regulators don’t see any immediate need for us to raise our capital,” he said. Shareholders continue to disagree.
And since slashing bonuses tends to leave a bitter taste in the mouths of shareholders, Sewing tried to spin recent speculation about the bank, telling Bild its “condition is significantly better than it seems.”
Sewing also defended the closure of 188 of 723 Deutsche Bank branches in Germany, and said that the bank has to adapt offer to customer behavior and reduce costs at the same time; almost half of customers come into branch only once a year. The good news is that he vowed the bank won’t impose negative interest rates on private customers, though zero interest rates may force many German banks to raise fees.
Finally, he commented on the recent stress test, saying “we don’t want to rank 43rd in long term, but the stress test can’t be read as a Bundesliga table; regulators saw no acute need for more capital.” It was unclear if he was referring to the ECB’s stress test which the bank passed, or the subsequent ZEW test which found that DB has a €19 billion capital shortfall, largeer than its entire market cap.
via http://ift.tt/2bArvP9 Tyler Durden