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Bloomberg
Deutsche Bank AG hired Citigroup Inc. Treasurer James von Moltke to replace Marcus Schenck as chief financial officer, completing a management shakeup that’s been key to the latest turnaround plan. Von Moltke will start in July, Deutsche Bank said in a statement, confirming a report by Bloomberg earlier on Friday. Germany’s biggest bank in March promoted Schenck to one of two deputy CEOs, with a mandate to co-run its investment banking and trading units.
Von Moltke joins a freshly recapitalized firm in the midst of dramatically restructuring its businesses. Europe’s biggest investment bank raised 8 billion euros ($8.7 billion) selling stock in early April as it seeks to dispel lingering doubts about its financial strength. Under a strategy unveiled by Chief Executive Officer John Cryan in March, the company plans to float a minority stake in its asset management unit and to reintegrate the consumer-banking subsidiary Postbank.
“His widespread experience in strategic planning and proven success in reshaping a multinational financial services company, will help us to reduce the complexity of our bank further and to achieve our ambitious targets,” Cryan said in the statement. Von Moltke, 48, joined Citigroup in 2009 and was promoted to treasurer in September 2015. Earlier, he spent 17 years as an investment banker at firms including JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Morgan Stanley.
Von Moltke, who advised financial firms on mergers and other deals while at Morgan Stanley, has years of experience working with troubled, complex businesses. He joined Citigroup months after the bank was bailed out in the U.S. to avoid collapse. The then-CEO Vikram Pandit tasked him with helping to shrink the Citi Holdings unit, a so-called bad bank with more than $600 billion of assets ranging from toxic subprime securities and private-equity stakes to entire businesses. The unit’s assets had fallen to $54 billion by the end of last year, statements show.
A German and Australian citizen, Von Moltke is related to Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, a Prussian military leader under Otto von Bismarck, and to Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, a German lawyer who became part of a resistance group against Adolf Hitler and was executed by the
Nazis in 1945.