What do Dresdner Bank and the Republic of Romania have in common? Both are trying to enhance their public image, battered by recent reports of high-level infighting and financial impropriety by senior officials.
But it was a particularly cruel irony that a photograph of Dresdner Bank's chairman Jürgen Sarrazin appeared in error next to a newspaper's headline: "Bucharest works on its image". The paper's picture desk had mistaken Sarrazin for Romanian president Emil Constantinescu.
The blunder came at the end of an awful October for Dresdner's 12-strong board, which is recovering from a triple shock: first supervisory board chairman Wolfgang Röller was forced to resign after being investigated for tax evasion (nothing has been proven); a few days later his board colleague Hans Adenauer was exposed as a self-confessed tax evader (he failed to warn them before it hit the papers). That in turn revealed the divide in the Dresdner ranks between ambitious strategists like Gerhard Eberstadt, Horst Müller and Gerd Häusler, and procrastinators like Christian Seidel and Sarrazin himself.
For the record, Dresdner has just produced an impressive set of nine-month results; Dresdner Kleinwort Benson has yet another new management structure, with Hansgeorg Hofmann displacing Eberstadt in prime spot; and Sarrazin and Seidel have announced their retirements.