Commerzbank defies Cerberus in chairman appointment

Commerzbank has defied its second-largest shareholder Cerberus by electing Hans-Jörg Vetter, the former chief executive of state-owned German lender LBBW, as its next chairman.

Cerberus holds a stake of more than 5 per cent in the struggling German lender. In an email seen by the Financial Times, the private equity group told the members of the stricken lender’s supervisory board that it had “serious doubts” that Mr Vetter was “the right person for this job or has the right experience for it”. 

The lender’s supervisory board on Monday afternoon nonetheless named Mr Vetter as the successor of outgoing chairman Stefan Schmittmann, who announced his resignation last month after Cerberus launched an attack on the German lender’s leadership and called for it to be given two seats on the supervisory board to “prevent Commerzbank’s demise”. 

Shares in Commerzbank closed 2.4 per cent higher on Monday.

Mr Vetter’s first task will be to find a successor for chief executive Martin Zielke, who announced his resignation alongside Mr Schmittmann last month and will leave the bank by the end of this year.

With a stake of 15.6 per cent, the German government is Commerzbank’s single largest shareholder after it bailed out the Frankfurt-based lender in the financial crisis a decade ago.

Shares in Commerzbank lost more than 40 per cent since merger talks with domestic rival Deutsche Bank collapsed in April last year. Analysts expect that the lender will swing to a net loss of €320m this year.

Cerberus in June argued that Commerzbank had a long history of missing its own “unambitious” strategic targets and “has consistently underperformed its peers on practically every metric”.

Commerzbank’s management has been discussing cutting up to 10,000 jobs, about a quarter of its workforce, and closing 800 of its 1,000 branches.

The 67-year-old Mr Vetter was the chief executive of LBBW from 2009 to 2016, when he led the restructuring of the state-owned bank which was hit hard by the financial crisis. He previously restructured Bankgesellschaft Berlin, another stricken public German lender.

In Sunday’s email to the supervisory board, Cerberus did not give detailed reasons for its opposition against Mr Vetter but said that it had “identified at least two candidates who have the required qualifications to fill the role of chairman and secure the confidence of all key stakeholders”.