“Mister Financial Centre”
Former Deutsche Bank CEO Rolf Breuer dies at 86
Former Deutsche Bank boss Rolf Breuer in a photo from 2016
© FrankHoemann/SVEN SIMON/ / Picture Alliance
Rolf Breuer shaped the financial center of Frankfurt and Deutsche Bank for years. One sentence cost him and his employer dearly. He has now died at the age of 86.
Former Deutsche Bank CEO Rolf-Ernst Breuer has died. Breuer died on Wednesday at the age of 86, after a long illness, surrounded by his family, Germany’s largest bank announced in Frankfurt on Thursday.
Breuer spent almost his entire professional life at Deutsche Bank. As CEO from May 1997 to May 2002, he drove the internationalization of the group and expanded the capital market business – despite some resistance. The manager then headed the bank’s supervisory board for four years.
During his time as CEO, “Mister Finanzplatz” made the Frankfurt institute one of the leading financial groups in the world. In 1999, Deutsche Bank celebrated the billion-dollar takeover of the US bank Bankers Trust. However, the intended merger with Dresdner Bank failed a year later shortly before completion.
Rolf Breuer’s term in office was not free of turbulence
The current Chairman of the Supervisory Board, Alexander Wynaendts, acknowledged that the Bankers Trust takeover had contributed significantly to “the fact that Deutsche Bank can now support its customers worldwide in all financial matters and has the global network and expertise necessary to do so.” In Rolf-Ernst Breuer, Deutsche Bank is losing “one of its most influential personalities.”
Breuer’s successor Josef Ackermann told the “Bild” newspaper: “Deutsche Bank owes a lot to Rolf Breuer.” He will remember a person “who you could always rely on,” said Ackermann. “Whenever there was bad press, he would say: Mr. Ackermann, don’t worry, your obituary will be much friendlier.”
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Breuer’s term in office was not free of turbulence either. There were only a few sentences that he spoke into a reporter’s microphone as head of Deutsche Bank at the beginning of 2002. Breuer questioned Leo Kirch’s creditworthiness in the short conversation with Bloomberg TV, which was published on February 4, 2002. The sentence cost him and his former employer dearly. Kirch’s media group went under shortly afterwards. Throughout his life, Kirch blamed Breuer and Deutsche Bank for this. It was only years later that the bank and the church heirs agreed on a settlement worth three-digit millions.