Commerzbank – Kohlhaussen’s big gamble

Commerzbank has defied history and set up a profitable global equities operation from scratch. Or has it? We can't measure the success of this adventure. Nor does the bank's management want us to know. It's staking everything on Wunderkind Mehmet Dalman whose empire, to his own amusement, is expanding by the minute. Laura Covill reports

   

Is he mad, bad or just recklessly confident? Few investment bankers would be as candid as Mehmet Dalman.

“It worries me that things are going so well,” says Dalman, Commerzbank’s head of equities, who last month also took over fixed income. “We couldn’t have planned that.”

“So it’s a fluke?”

“Well, yes.”

Dalman makes it clear he has little time for his commercial banking bosses. His real hero is John Meriwether, fallen angel of Salomon Brothers and Long-Term Capital Management.


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