On December 9 hundreds of senior managers of HypoVereinsbank, Germany's second biggest bank, will converge on Munich to listen to their executive chairman Albrecht Schmidt.
Schmidt, known internally as "little Napoleon", will explain to them how it was not his vanity and over-vaulting ambition that paralyzed the bank for a year. Far from it. It was a necessary, if rather slow blood-letting, to purge the bank - the result of a 1998 merger between Bayerische Vereinsbank (BV), previously run by Schmidt, and Bayerische Hypotheken- und Wechselbank (Hypobank) - of its worst Hypobank elements.
Schmidt, assisted by a couple of lieutenants from McKinsey, will unveil a strategy - Kurs 125 - to take the bank into the next century, and achieve a near-doubling of the share price to €125. At the end of November it stood at around €70.
There is more than a touch of irony here. HypoVereinsbank is in play. During...
