Leading members of Germany's ruling Social Democrats and Greens have rounded on Deutsche Bank over its planned jobs cut, one even calling for Germans to boycott the country's largest bank. Deutsche Bank has enraged centre-left politicians with its plans to axe almost 2,000 staff in Germany, while making a 2.55 billion euro ($3.26 billion) profit in 2004, an 87 percent increase on the previous year.
But the bank, which plans to shed 6,400 jobs world-wide in a bid to boost earnings by over 20 percent in 2005, drew backing on Wednesday from Bundesbank board member Edgar Meister, who called for a quick end to the controversy.
Greens co-leader Reinhard Buetikofer on Wednesday denounced the bank's chief, Josef Ackermann, as "arrogant".
"I see an irresponsible head of Deutsche Bank, who acts as if he can just make demands from society and politicians, as if he does not need to be a good citizen," he said on television.
Social Democrat (SPD) General Secretary Klaus Uwe Benneter has questioned whether Deutsche Bank deserves its name as jobs in its home base disappear.
"They would have to abandon this name out of decency if they deal with their responsibility and the position of Germany in such a way," he told n-tv television station late on Tuesday.
The harshest words have come from Andrea Ypsilanti, president of the SPD in Hesse, the German state which includes Frankfurt, where Deutsche Bank is based.
"Every customer of Deutsche Bank can consider whether he is doing more for jobs in Germany by switching to a public Sparkasse (savings bank) or a co-operative bank," she said on Tuesday.
She argued that the government had made conditions very favourable for the bank.
Edmund Stoiber, the conservative premier of Bavaria, also joined the critics, accusing management of "tastelessness" and "incompetence".
BANKERS CLOSE RANKS: The Bundesbank's Meister, who is also chairman of the European Union's Banking Supervision Committee, said that German banks had below average profits and needed sufficient revenues to be able to provide credit to the rest of the economy.
"It should not be frowned upon if some banks aim for profits that allow them to regain their place in the international premier league," Meister told the Financial Times Deutschland in an article released ahead of publication on Thursday.
Olaf Kayser, an analyst at Landesbank Rheinland-Pfalz, said Deutsche Bank had to be driven by competition in Europe even if the job cuts were hard for the German public to accept.
"Through a higher profitability the stock price can be increased. This is necessary to gain more strategic room for manoeuvre and to be able to play an active role in cross-border mergers," he said.
Rolf Breuer, the chairman of Deutsche Bank's supervisory board, said this week he was surprised at the sudden vitriol directed at Deutsche CEO Ackermann, because the job cuts had already been announced in December.
Furthermore, thin banking margins and a sluggish economy meant it could not be ruled out that more job cuts lay ahead. "We are not yet at the end," Breuer told the Frankfurt International Business Journalists' Club.