The chief executive of German public bank WestLB and another board member were dismissed Thursday in a major management shake-up, supervisory board chairman Rolf Gerlach said, according to dpa. CEO Thomas Fischer lost his job along with Matthijs van den Adel, a member of the board of management in charge of risk management. Fischer was replaced by Alexander Stuhlmann, Gerlach said after an extraordinary meeting of the supervisory board. The purge at Germany's third-biggest public sector bank follows its massive losses in speculation on shares and allegations that the management failed to inform the supervisory board. The bank's shareholders are the German state of North Rhine- Westphalia and savings banks. The losses led to the dismissal of two traders, who are under investigation by prosecutors after WestLB filed a criminal complaint against them. Stuhlmann, 59, was until last year head of the Hamburg-based HSH Nordbank, a public sector bank that has been partly privatized. "We have found the right person to steer the bank into calmer waters," Gerlach told a news conference after the supervisory board meeting. Stuhlmann said he was taken by surprise when Gerlach approached him at the beginning of the week and asked him if he wanted to take charge of the WestLB. The bank's management has been criticized for not telling the top board in due time about the trading losses, which mounted as staff flouted cautionary rules and someone leaked the secret speculation strategy. Before the meeting began, there was speculation that the entire seven-member management board might be removed - a move unprecedented in modern world of big German banks. Fischer was appointed chief executive of WestLB in early 2004 when the bank was in a precarious financial situation after billions of dollars in losses. He instituted a series of restructuring and cost-cutting measures, including the hiving off of different commercial interests. WestLB had a business volume of 285 billion euros (393 billion dollars) last year.
