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| *Erik Nolmans Josef Ackerman und die Deutsche Bank – Anatomie eines Aufstiegs (“Josef Ackermann and Deutsche Bank – anatomy of an ascent”) (Zürich, Orell Füssli Verlag, 2006, SFr39.90 ISBN: 3280052025) |
Joseph Ackermann’s father saw enough ruined drunks and gamblers in his Alpine doctor’s surgery to warn his son – “Seppi” in those days - not to destroy wealth in the pub or playing Jass, the Swiss card game. A solid and disciplined relationship with money, Seppi is supposed to have learnt, would protect him from a descent into social misery.
Dishonesty was met with the occasional fatherly clip around the ear. Sincerity was key. “If you help yourself, God helps you” and “The strong man is mightiest alone” were among the Allemani aphorisms, the kind chiselled into awnings all over the Alps, that Seppi internalized and that are said strongly to inform him to this day. One key life tip ought also to have been: beware the overzealous German secretary.
For one such lady, working in the “Compensations and Benefits” department at Mannesmann, the traditional German industrial conglomerate which, after a fierce bidding war in 2000, Vodafone swallowed whole in pursuit of its mobile assets, has ultimately precipitated a descent into a social misery of sorts for Ackermann. Because of her, accusations of dishonesty and financial ill-discipline have, fairly or otherwise, attached themselves to him in portions of the German public mind.
The secretary in question didn’t like the look of the casual paperwork from the supervisory board sub-committee where Ackermann sat, which had signed off – “with a croupier’s gesture” (Weltwoche) – €30 million in post-merger bonuses or “Appreciation Awards”. These had originally been the suggestion of a delighted shareholder, Hutchison Whampoa. The delight sprang from the fact that the acquisition had enabled Hutchison to exit a complicated holding in Mannesmann originating from its stake in Orange, with a large cash profit.
Especially problematic for this firmly diligent secretary, and a subsequent army of indignant pundits, lawyers, academics and judges, was that Mannesmann’s non-executive board chief, Joachim Funk, had apparently signed off his own €3 million bonus in this short committee meeting, and that Ackermann had approved this not only on his own behalf but also, after a brief phone call, on behalf of an absent committee member – as luck would have it, a trade union boss. The Mannesmann compensations chief shooed away the secretary’s initial concerns about protocol. She persisted, though, seeking out the company’s internal auditor. And so it went public.
It is Ackermann, rather than Funk, who has gone on to become a symbol of the subsequent trials, despite not gaining, or seeking to gain, a single cent from the bonuses he signed off. Spiegel magazine has dubbed him “Boo-man of the nation”. Nor was it even Ackermann’s day job; rather a non-exec seat, bequeathed to him in the Deutsche Bank tradition by his mentor and head-hunter, Hilmar Kopper.
Meanwhile, in what is beginning to seem like a footnote, Ackermann has built Deutsche Bank into one of the most powerful and successful banks in Europe and is making a good go of eradicating the “Germany” discount from the its share price.
So why can’t Germany and Joseph Ackermann get along? We can find some answers in a new biography* of the Deutsche Bank chief by Erik Nolmans, a fellow Swiss and also a biographer of Ackermann’s former boss at Credit Suisse, Rainer Gut. Nolmans seems to expect on balance that Germany and Ackermann will split, sooner rather than later.
This is despite Ackermann, in February this year, becoming Deutsche Bank’s first ever chairman for 136 years rather than “board speaker”, with a contract that runs to 2010, also despite the stellar results, and despite his having steered Germany’s biggest bank against all the odds and against the domestic will into the global bulge bracket.
People close to Ackermann see the chances of a second acquittal in the Mannesmann retrial this autumn, ordered by Germany’s constitutional court in December, as less than even. Ackermann has stated that if he is convicted he will surrender his Deutsche Bank job, without a payoff. According to Nolmans, he is also likely at the soonest opportunity to head back into the Anglo-Saxon realm, probably New York, where he has an apartment he loves, maybe to work in private equity. ‘There is a life after Deutsche Bank,’ he says.
We can grant Nolmans proximity to Ackermann: his book contains private family photos and describes a Heidi-esque childhood in detail – the time Seppi kicked a stone through his father’s surgery window, how he would smash his table tennis ball into the wall in a defeated rage, how he conquered the prettiest girl at high school.
Ackermann/Germany has the makings of a classic divorce. A fundamental incompatibility has simmered since the beginning of the union, which events have exacerbated into a ferocious set of misunderstandings and mutual recriminations that stem from deeply held irreconcilable differences of belief.
For our part, we must wonder about the most important casualty of the divorce: the troubled child they have raised together, as Ackermann has it, “the baby of all Germans”. What, in other words, will happen to Deutsche Bank, just at a time when, thanks largely to Ackermann’s disciplined parenting, it is beginning to win excellent grades across the board? Worryingly, Nolmans says that Ackermann has so far neglected, despite the advice of Kopper, to create a viable set of successors.
In a peculiar aspect of this biography, we aren’t told a great deal of what Ackermann feels about recent events – a sarcastic aside to the court or doleful remark to friends here, a controversial V-for-victory sign there, but no documented fit of pique since the occasion in the late 1980s when he abandoned his office for a few days after being passed over for promotion at Credit Suisse. But it doesn’t take much guesswork from the other information about Ackermann – his alleged vanity, his ambition (a characteristic everyone attributes to him), his desire to be seen as a winner, and his belief in loyalty and discretion – to assume that he is absolutely furious about Mannesmann. The case levels at him and his co-defendants Untreue (literally, “disloyalty”). In corporate legal terms it means the abandonment of their fiduciary duty.