Tighten your Belts!

Headquarters of Deutsche Bank AG in Frankfurt am Main
We have all read about the instability in financial markets and the effect of the crisis in global liquidity on financial institutions and individuals. But it is the heart rending human interest stories which really bring it home; the repossessed homes, negative equity, declining home prices and in a report in the papers on April 23 2008 the truly tragic story that Deutsche Bank employees, who number 78,000 workers worldwide, have received a stiff no-naughtiness-on-the-firm's-plastic missive.

Deutsche Bank, Germany's largest, has been hit by the global credit crunch so badly that it has issued a memorandum to senior executives telling them that brothel visits and adult channels in hotel rooms cannot be claimed on expenses.

"Deutsche Bank does not approve of any adult entertainments, and such expenditures will not be reimbursed," said a memo that was leaked to the news magazine Spiegel. The memo further warns that the bank's credit cards must not be used for such purposes.

Nein! Nein! Nein!
Whether the edict was prompted by a recent upsurge in executives seeking relief from Deutsche Bank's sub-prime horrors – more than £2bn in write-down so far – via Germany's vast network of pleasure houses is unclear. Further belt-tightening at the bank includes the instruction that bosses must approve taxi journeys in advance, business meals must not exceed £50 per person, and train rides inside Germany must be second-class if they take less than one hour.


Oompah Verboten!

One further stipulation: employees on overnight flights who are expected to go to work or attend meetings on arrival must now shower at the airport instead of booking a hotel. Apparently, there have been "minor infringements" of late that the bank wants to stamp out.

A Deutsche Bank insider said: "In the good old days, you could pass off a trip to a knocking-shop as a restaurant if the name wasn't too obvious. But we're in an uptight, locked-down new Puritanism now, not helped by sub-prime or VW."

At Volkswagen, people have been jailed and fined tens of thousands of pounds after a secret plan was discovered whereby union bosses were to be paid off with prostitutes, sex parties and drugs in exchange for an agreement on downsizing.

Truly, in these trying times Deutsche Bank will not be alone in trying to squeeze corporate overheads!