Deutsche Bank cuts top pay

Germany's biggest private lender announced Friday that Deutsche Bank's joint Chief Executives Anshu Jain and Jürgen Fitschen would receive 4.8 million euros ($6.2 million) each in variable and fixed pay, as well as in long-term incentives.

The two executives' pay was significantly below the European average, board chairman Paul Achleitner told a news conference in Frankfurt, adding that the salaries were falling substantially short of the about 10 million euros earned by former Deutsche Bank CEO Josef Ackermann in the previous year.

Achleitner said the pay had been adjusted to reflect the bank's performance in 2012. In January, Deutsche Bank reported its worst quarterly loss in four years. Moreover, this week the bank was forced to restate its 2012 earnings to the tune of 2.4 billion euros for 2012 because of an additional 600 million euros in litigation.

For the whole management board salary payments for 2012 came in at 26.3 million euros in fixed and variable pay - down from about 40 million euros paid a year earlier. The variable component would be paid out in shares which needed to be held by the executives for a period of five years, Achleitner said.

The Deutsche Bank chairman declined to say if the bank would raise fixed salaries in the aftermath of a European Union rule that has put a cap on performance-related bonuses. The EU recently banned bonuses higher than bankers' base salaries.

On Friday, Deutsche Bank's independent pay review committee recommended that Europe's banks would likely need to raise fixed salaries if they were to remain competitive with banks not subject to the EU rule.

uhe/rc (Reuters, dpa)