‘Finish Them’ Email Pressures Deutsche Bank Board Member

(Bloomberg) -- A member of Deutsche Bank AG’s supervisory board faced criticism from lawmakers and the bank itself for suggesting that Wirecard AG go after a newspaper that had written critical stories about the since-collapsed payments company.

The director, Alexander Schuetz, made the remark in an email to Wirecard’s then-Chief Executive Officer Markus Braun in which he also informed the CEO that he had purchased the firm’s shares recently, German lawmaker Jens Zimmermann said at a parliamentary hearing late last night.

“Finish them,” Schuetz reportedly wrote in the 2019 email, referring to the Financial Times, which had published a series of articles alleging irregularities at the payments company.

Schuetz on Friday apologized for the remarks, telling Bloomberg News that he believed at the time the accusations against Wirecard were unfounded. The executive said he hasn’t thought about the implications of the email for his mandate at Deutsche Bank, but will discuss the issue with Chairman Paul Achleitner.

Schuetz is co-founder and CEO of C-Quadrat, the Austrian asset manager that oversaw HNA Group Co.’s investment in the German lender until the Chinese conglomerate sold the stake. He joined Deutsche Bank’s supervisory board in 2017 and has remained after HNA’s exit. He’s also the largest shareholder of the cyber security firm Cyan AG, which issued a profit warning after the Wirecard collapse.

Deutsche Bank’s ties with Wirecard have come under scrutiny as part of a parliamentary probe into the collapse of the payments company. Chief Accounting Officer Andreas Loetscher is temporarily stepping down from his role to focus on investigations and inquiries surrounding the probe. Before joining the lender, he was a two-decade veteran at accounting firm Ernst & Young and oversaw the Wirecard audits for the financial years 2015 through 2017.

Wirecard filed for insolvency in June last year, in what has become Germany’s biggest postwar accounting scandal, with former executives including Braun in jail or on the run. Deutsche Bank CEO Christian Sewing said in testimony late Thursday that he hadn’t been aware of Schuetz’s email.

“As a matter of principle, we do not comment on private statements made by members of the supervisory board,” Deutsche Bank spokesman Joerg Eigendorf said by email. “Irrespective of this, however, both the content and the attitude of the quoted statement are unacceptable -- regardless of who it comes from.”

Deutsche Bank shares fell as much as 4.3% on Friday and were 3.5% lower as of 5p.m. in Frankfurt.

The extracts from the email inserted a dose of drama into an otherwise drawn-out hearing that delved for hours into the finer points of who might have known what in the months leading up to Wirecard’s collapse.

Sewing didn’t get to speak until shortly before midnight, following executives from Commerzbank AG who were grilled during the afternoon and evening sessions. Sewing’s question-and-answer session lasted until about 3 a.m., by which time the rows of participants and audience had visibly thinned and some members of the panel showed clear signs of fatigue.

Schuetz’s email came up twice, and lawmakers expressed outrage that such communication should be linked to Germany’s preeminent financial institution. The executive sits on a 20-strong supervisory board at Deutsche Bank that also includes ex-Merill Lynch CEO John Thain and which is responsible for advising and supervising the management board led by Sewing under a two-tier management system.

The FT ran a series of stories in 2019 accusing Wirecard of suspicious accounting practices that the company at the time dismissed, in turn accusing the newspaper of working with shortsellers to manipulate its share price. Germany’s financial watchdog then decreed a temporary ban on shorting Wirecard’s stock and filed a criminal complaint against two FT journalists.

“I apologize in all form to the Financial Times and its reporters for this emotional and misplaced statement,” Schuetz wrote in his statement to Bloomberg. “The status of today’s investigation on the contrary shows that the Financial Times made an essential contribution to revealing this scandal.”

(Updates with Deutsche Bank shares in ninth paragraph)