German companies have been spying on their employees and shareholders, and the practice seems to be widespread. In some cases, firms like Deutsche Bank have hired private detectives to trail dissident shareholders. At the other extreme, the Deutsche Bahn (German Railway) illegally accessed the data of 173,000 employees. In some case, top German corporations have gone to ridiculous lengths to gather the most mundane information on their employees:
.Laut "Stern" wurde hier am runden Tisch mit Abteilungsleitern,
Meistern, Werkärzten und Betriebsräten besprochen, was mit kranken
Mitarbeitern zu geschehen habe. Betriebsrat Tom Adler spricht von einem
"Ort der Bespitzelung": Die Meister sollen dort von der Schuppenflechte
ihrer Untergebenen erzählt haben, von Scheidung, der sterbenden Mutter,
von Alkoholproblemen und psychiatrischen Behandlungen. Die
Informationen wurden dann in den Unterlagen der Personalabteilung
schriftlich festgehalten, berichtet das Magazin. (Even some of the most prominent corporations such as Daimler have come under criticism. According to Stern, at Daimler, department heads, foremen, company medical staff and shop stewards would meet to discuss the cases of ill employees. Tom Adler described these as "spying sessions": the foremen told of their subordinates' dandruff problems, divorces, dying mother, alchohol abuse and psychiatric treatments. The infomation was then included in the employees' personnel files.)
Deutsche Bank is now paying the price for having spied on a shareholder:
Bohndorf, who was spied on by detectives the bank hired, sued
the lender and its chairman Clemens Boersig over the investor-
espionage affair.[…]“The defendants acted with outrageous chutzpah, as if they
regarded themselves being above the law,” Bohndorf wrote in the
complaint. “Both showed that apparently they are willing to use
any means and to ignore any rules.”
But this is perhaps only the tip of the iceberg for German bank. Each week there are new revelations concerning the scope of Deutsche Bank's espionage activities.
The Economist has a good piece about the weaknesses of corporate governance in Germany. Spying is just one aspect of German boards behaving badly:
and Lidl have been caught spying on workers, journalists or board
members. Siemens has confessed to bribing customers and MAN is being
investigated for the same. At Volkswagen, a manager was caught paying
off a member of its supervisory board. Schaeffler and Porsche are in
trouble after launching murky, ill-conceived takeovers involving
derivatives and mountains of debt.
Germany's insular supervisory boards are often paranoid, and the are few institutional investors that are able to force corrective action or changes. Hedge funds or large private equity groups are demonized as "locusts":
activist shareholders led by the Children’s Investment Fund, a London
hedge fund, forced Deutsche Börse to abandon its bid for the London
Stock Exchange in 2005, the government passed laws making it harder for
minority shareholders to push reforms. Christopher Hohn, who runs the
fund, was labelled a “locust” for his aggressive tactics, and has since
given up trying to change the company. Few Germans are likely to do
battle in his stead.
