ACTIONS CORNER

The allegations of improper conduct that has brought the three American banks Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo into disrepute are now being levelled at a number of non US banks. Deutsche Bank, Barclays, Credit Suisse, HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland and UBS were all supposedly involved in selling and trading junk bonds in sub-prime American real-estate dealings. Each individual bank will almost certainly have to pay out amounts varying from several hundred million up to 2 or 3 billion Dollars. These nine international majors face charges of having deliberately given misleading information in their dealings based on Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities (RMBS). stated as the mortgage worth of United States real estate. Deutsche Bank has had to pay out billions for its involvement in a long series of financial scandals.

During the June 16 hearing of the criminal proceedings against Deutsche Bank, the plaintiff sought to establish whether Jürgen Fitschen was an accomplice in covering up the testimony of the other accused in order to sabotage a claim for damages brought against the bank by Leo Kirch, an allegation that Fitschen denies. There are marked differences between the evidence given by the Co-CEO and that of the other accused as regards the executive board meeting of 29 January 2002. Fitschen stresses that the differences are of a merely immaterial nature. In a separate case, the former Co-CEO of the group gave evidence to the effect that he had understood that former CEO Ernst Breuer intended to approach Kirch to ascertain whether the former media mogul, who was also heavily indebted to Deutsche Bank, would be interested in dismantling his group, leaving it open to be sold off at a profit.