The founder of the Viennese asset manager C-Quadrat, Alexander Schütz, is stepping down from the Supervisory Board of Deutsche Bank. The Austrian was most recently discredited because of an email to the ex-Wirecard boss Markus Braun – also an Austrian. On February 17, 2019, he wrote with reference to the “Financial Times”, which at that time had already reported critically about Wirecard: “By the way, I bought 3x Wirecard shares last week, finish this newspaper !!”. In June 2020, the payment provider filed for bankruptcy, and since then Braun has been in custody, among other things, on suspicion of commercial fraud.
The explosive email correspondence had become public within the framework of the German Wirecard investigation committee. Deutsche Bank then distanced itself from Schütz in unusually clear terms. Both the content and the attitude of the quoted statement in the mail are “unacceptable”. A little later, Schütz resigned from the important positions on the Supervisory Board.
Successor on Friday
On Wednesday evening, the Austrian who had previously apologized “in all form to the Financial Times and its reporters for this emotional and misplaced statement”, drew a line and resigned from the supervisory board. His mandate would have run until 2023. “I have decided to leave the supervisory board of Deutsche Bank for the next general meeting,” said Schütz. “I had a lot of fun actively accompanying the turnaround of Deutsche Bank and realigning the management team.” Deutsche Bank did not want to comment on this for the time being.
According to an insider, the bank's supervisory body will meet today, Thursday, on the occasion of the publication of the 2020 annual report, which is planned for Friday. It cannot be ruled out that a successor for Schütz will then be named.
Confidante of the Chinese HNA
In January it became known that Schütz had sold his Deutsche Bank shares. The finance manager was one of the 15 largest shareholders. Since 2019, he has owned around 17.4 million shares (0.84 percent) in Germany's largest bank through his family office in Vienna City. According to a “courier” report, it was the remaining holdings of the Chinese conglomerate HNA, once the largest shareholder in the German credit institution. Like the Chinese, Schütz held his shares through a complex construction of derivatives. C-Quadrat managed the Chinese stake in Deutsche Bank, which is why Schütz moved to the supervisory board in 2017. In Austria, Schütz is to be questioned in the Ibiza committee of inquiry.
