After being entangled in the “Cum-Ex” tax fraud, there is an unusually large amount of movement in the management of the Hamburg-based private bank MM Warburg & Co.

The 52-year-old Peter Rentrop-Schmid is leaving the group of partners for personal reasons.

However, he will remain chairman of the supervisory board of the Degussa Bank subsidiary, which is up for sale, and will, according to reports, take over tasks in the Olearius family empire again in the foreseeable future.

Hanno Mußler

Editor in business.

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    The connection between the 56-year-old Matthias Schellenberg and Warburg, however, has finally broken.

    Schellenberg, who only moved to Warburg from the Munich bank Merck Finck in December 2020, is said to have appeared too cocky and for the conservative bank with personally ambitious goals.

    Formally, they agreed to leave the company on the “best of terms”, but according to information from the FAZ, the impetus for the separation from Warburg came out.

    Better returns with iron brooms

    In this delicate situation, in which there are only two managing directors on board the Warburg Bank, 50-year-old Joachim Olearius and 61-year-old Patrick Tessmann, the chairman of the supervisory board, Bernd Thiemann, has revived an old connection: the one with Manuela Better. "New brooms sweep well, but old brooms know exactly where the dirt is", Thiemann said in 2010 with little charm about Better when he had spent a large part of her professional life at Hypo Real Estate (HRE) and Bayerische Vereinsbank , In 2010 after the abrupt departure of Axel Wieandt in the middle of the financial crisis as CEO of the emergency nationalized HRE. There Better earned the reputation of a tough renovator with a lot of real estate expertise. Out of disappointmentthat the federal government canceled the negotiated sale of Depfa-Bank to hedge funds, she resigned in June 2014.

    Thiemann is now bringing Better to Warburg's management as the new head of risk.

    There the now 60-year-old manager is to improve Warburg's relationship with the banking supervisory authority, which has been strained because of “Cum-Ex”, from July 4th for at least the next three years.

    No revision by Deka against Cum-Ex

    Better was most recently Chief Risk Officer of the Sparkassenfondsgesellschaft Deka until May 2020. There she replaced Birgit Dietl gasoline, which came from UBS. According to information from the FAZ, Better was then in discussion as the head of Nord LB and Aareal Bank - but did not get a chance there. The woman, who is reserved in the conversation, can be trusted to calm Warburg's relationship with the banking supervisory authority. In Deka, after a cost-benefit analysis, she worked to ensure that the Sparkassen-Fondsgesellschaft lost EUR 50 million in taxes from cum-ex transactions in 2016 after a defeat at the Hessian Finance Court and did not go into revision. The Warburg owners Olearius and Max Warburg, on the other hand, with their lawyers, including Peter Gauweiler, have so far been more likely to riot and try, among other things,dragging Deutsche Bank into the cum-ex swamp - so far without success in court.

    Risk expert Better is not only cautious, but also fearless. The manager likes to spend her private vacations in the jungle. Only the corona pandemic has prevented her from visiting northern Peru, Mongolia and the Easter Islands since she left Deka a good year ago. Munich-based Better still has to postpone the tours that have already been booked. During the week she will now be needed in Hamburg.