Despite a huge potential client base, Germany has proven reluctant to adapt its legal and tax systems to attract Islamic finance, which has enjoyed stellar success in Britain.
Commerzbank, the second-largest German bank, said on Monday it would benefit from €8.2 billion and €15 billion more in debt guarantees – becoming the second major financial institution to apply for state aid after the financial crisis.
German politicians were fast to blame "Anglo-Saxon" excesses for the financial crisis but the country's own banks, particularly state-owned lenders, have been anything but risk-averse.
The head of Germany’s biggest bank will forego his annual bonus of several million euros to show solidarity with staff in this time of financial crisis, he told daily in an advance release of <i>Bild am Sonntag</i>.
With Germany making a blanket guarantee to cover all of the country’s savings, other European countries are under increased pressure on Monday to bolster their financial defences in the face of a global financial crisis.
German states that have financed their infrastructure through cross border leasing with the United States are at risk of losing their transportation systems as the global financial crisis looms, daily <i>Berliner Zeitung</i> reported on Monday.
With Germans wondering how employees at the KfW bank came to sink over €300 million ($500 million) into Lehman Brothers just hours before the Wall Street firm collapsed, one paper has gone straight to the source.
German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück has called for KfW officials to pay the consequences for the state development bank's mistake transfer of €300 million ($427 million) to Lehman Brothers just as the US investment bank was collapsing.
Victims of internet password fraud rose significantly in the last year, with so-called online "phishing" up by 25 percent, the German Association for Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media (BITKOM) reported on Tuesday.
The board of German insurer Allianz is to recommend its Dresdner Bank unit be sold to Commerzbank paving the way for a major overhaul of Germany’s banking sector, press reports said on Friday.
An armed gang targeted a luxury yacht off a Mediterranean island with German financiers in a daring heist, officials said Monday. Masked gunmen stormed aboard the yacht off the French island of Corsica, overpowered crew and guests and made off with €138,000 ($204,000) from its safe.
Shares of both insurer Allianz and lender Commerzbank got a boost Monday amid widening reports the latter is about to relieve the former of its cumbersome Dresdner Bank division.
Regional French bank Credit Mutuel said on Friday that it will pay €4.9 billion ($7.7 billion) to buy the German business of US banking giant Citigroup, hard hit by the global financial crisis.
Dresdner Bank, a subsidiary of the German insurance group Allianz, will open its first Indian office next year, offering services from accounts to mortgages and consumer loans, the bank said Thursday.
Germany’s Dresdner Bank has extended $1.5 billion to one of its affiliated specialist investment funds, K2, to allow it to repay debt, the latest in a series of such bailouts amid a global credit crunch.
