Dany date

Dany Dattel (bourgeois Daniel Dattel ; * 1939 or 1940 ) was the last head of the foreign exchange department at the Herstatt Bank, which went bankrupt in June 1974 . He also became known as a sought-after expert on currency issues on television in the 1970s.

Life

Dany Dattel was interned in Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944.

Dattel completed a bank apprenticeship at Herstatt from 1958 and saw the release of fixed exchange rates in 1971. Only the subsequent floating , i.e. the free formation of exchange rates without the dutiful intervention of the national banks, made speculative international currency trading possible, which also other German and international ones Banks used for their own trading (i.e. the non-customer-driven business). Initially, the business brought high profits, with Herstatt generating sales of around DM 24 billion in 1973 forex trading. The profits were the main reason for Dattel's rise to head of department. At that time, Dattel was head of a department of six very young foreign exchange dealers (banker Iwan David Herstatt called them his "golden boys") as well as the processing department.

Contrary to Dattel's forecast, however, the US dollar exchange rate fell from around March 1974. Closing out the open currency positions lead to increasing losses (see Herstatt-Bank article ), which ultimately consume equity and lead to the bank becoming overindebted.

Date was under investigation by the prosecutor's office on August 26, 1976 on suspicion of breach of trust, fraud and false accounting, together with the banker Ivan David Herstatt and six other managers of the bank temporarily in custody taken. After the trial began on March 23, 1979, the public prosecutor's office accused the defendants of embezzlement and aiding and abetting in particularly serious bankruptcy: the defendants had “in the period from March 1971 until the bank was closed on June 26, 1974, due to large-scale foreign exchange speculations that were unjustifiable In relation to the bank's reported own funds, the depositors' assets were endangered and damaged ”. The astronomical extent of these transactions can be illustrated by the fact that an average of around 180 transactions with a volume of over DM 4 billion were concluded per business day.

On August 31, 1983, the Cologne Regional Court sentenced two other persons responsible for the above-mentioned allegations to imprisonment of 2 years and 5 months each, plus a fine of 45,000 DM each. Whether Dattel could have met a similar penalty will remain a secret forever the proceedings against him were dropped in 1979. He was declared unable to stand trial because experts certified that he suffered from what is known as the concentration camp syndrome .

The former banker Herstatt raised allegations against Dattel in his autobiography " The Destruction ". Its false speculations and false information would have concealed the true extent of the imbalance and significantly caused the bankruptcy. To date, however, it has not been fully clarified how the allocation of blame for the largest German bank insolvency of the post-war period is to be distributed. Until 2006, Dattel himself sued the Luxembourg District Court for the surrender of 2.822 million DM, which allegedly belonged to his family and were confiscated in the context of the Herstatt bankruptcy. His lawsuits were ultimately unsuccessful, but delayed the processing of the Herstatt insolvency considerably.

Today Dattel lives in a public shyness in Cologne-Sülz . According to information from Creditreform , he and his wife Margot took affidavits about the financial situation in 2004 .

Literature and theater

In the play "Kölner Devisen" by Jan Stephan Hillebrand, which deals with the Herstatt bankruptcy, Dany Dattel is portrayed in the role of "Felix Feige".

Individual evidence

1. ↑ http://www.rheinische-geschichte.lvr.de/PERSOENLICHUNGEN/H/Seiten/Iwan-DavidHerstatt.aspx?print=true
2. ↑ Kölner Rundschau from August 9, 2006
3. ↑ Süddeutsche from May 17, 2010, Commander Dattel and his gold boys
4. ↑ Handelsblatt dated May 19, 2004 ( Memento of the original dated March 12, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  

Web links

• Peter Brors and Thomas Knüwer: The Fall of the Golden Boys. In: Handelsblatt . May 19, 2004, accessed on January 19, 2015 (about the Herstatt bankruptcy and the role of Dany Dattels). 
• Eckhard Fuhr: Employee farmers' theater. In: The world . November 10, 2004, accessed on January 19, 2015 (about the play).