Probe Shows Deutsche Bank Spied on Board Members and Shareholder
Spiegel Online reports on a scandal at Deutsche Bank.
Deutsche Bank didn’t just spy on members of its management and supervisory boards. It also snooped on the personal life of a troublesome shareholder, according to a report it commissioned to investigate the matter. Now officials at Germany’s largest bank fear they may be facing a lawsuit. [...]
This case is reminiscent of the case last year, when Deutsche Telekom admitted it had secretly combed through its own millions of call records to review the calls made by some of its executives in order to ferret out which employees leaked information to the media. There was a huge uproar, German officials began an investigation, and an arrest was made.
Recently, an investigation commission by Deutsche Bank revealed disturbing news.
Leading executives at the bank hired external “specialists” to solve their security problems — some of them real, some of them imagined — and those specialists in some cases resorted to dubious methods. [...]
Gerald Herrmann, an official from the Ver.di services union who had a seat on Deutsche Bank’s supervisory board at the time, was suspected in 2001 of having leaked the bank’s third-quarter results to the Reuters news agency. The Corporate Security department reacted by hiring external detectives to monitor him.
At first the bank had only admitted comparing travel data such as hotel stays to establish a link between Herrmann and a Reuters reporter. But it’s now clear that the snooping operations went much further in some cases. [...]
The investigators compiled detailed reports on [one shareholder's] movements and even looked into whether he had any personal weaknesses: alcohol, gambling, women? One insider reports that the agency resorted to hiring women to test him.
Spiegel Online reports that Deutsche Bank Chief Josef Ackermann ordered an investigation, “but the bank faces a major conflict of interest in the form of supervisory board chairman Clemens Borsig, who shares responsibility for at least some of the snooping operations.”
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