FRANKFURT: The two top officials of scandal-hit Deutsche Bank have announced to quit the European financial giant.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the resignation of Juergen Fitschen and Anshu Jain could be officially announced as soon as Sunday and raises questions over the future direction of Germany’s biggest lender, the paper said, citing sources familiar with the matter.
Deutsche Bank is mired in around 6,000 different litigation cases and was recently fined a record $2.5 billion (2.2 billion euros) for its involvement in an interest rate-rigging scandal.
In mid-May, the bank confirmed that it had opened an internal probe into its investment division in Russia, with the German press evoking possible money laundering. Bloomberg reported the case involved some $6 billion in transactions over four years.
Jain will reportedly step down at the end of June, while Fitschen plans to stay on in the job until after Deutsche Bank’s annual shareholder meeting in May 2016. The men have been in their current positions since 2012.
A Deutsche Bank spokesman declined to comment on the report.
At the company’s annual meeting last month the two CEOs faced shareholder wrath over the string of scandals and poor profitability. The bank has so far failed to meet its profit targets for this year.
Deutsche Bank, which employs a workforce of more than 98,000 and has annual revenues of some 32 billion euros, is torn between its ambitions in investment banking, on the one hand, and its historic domestic retail banking network on the other.
Despite substantial efforts to cut costs and diversify, the bank continues to lag behind its Anglo-Saxon rivals.
