Ludwig Poullain

Ludwig Poullain (born December 23, 1919 in Lüttringhausen ; † February 10, 2015 in Münster ) was a German bank manager . From 1969 to 1977 he was Chairman of the Board of WestLB and from 1967 to 1972 President of the German Savings Banks and Giro Association (DSGV).

The grave of Ludwig Poullain in the Münster Central Cemetery .

Life

Ludwig Poullain was born in Lüttringhausen, now the city of Remscheid , as the third son of a master baker. After graduating from secondary school , he began an apprenticeship at the Stadtsparkasse Remscheid in 1937 . With the beginning of the Second World War in 1939 he became a soldier; at the end of the war he was first lieutenant . From 1950 he became an association auditor at the Rhenish Savings Banks and Giro Association . Further stations in his career were from 1955 a board member at Stadt-Sparkasse Solingen and from 1958 chairman of the board at Kreissparkasse Recklinghausen .

In 1964 he moved to the "Landesbank für Westfalen Girozentrale" in Münster , where he took over the general management in 1966. On January 1, 1969, the Landesbank für Westfalen Girozentrale merged with the "Rheinische Girozentrale und Provinzialbank" in Düsseldorf to form the "Westdeutsche Landesbank Girozentrale" (WestLB) based in Düsseldorf and Münster. This created the largest bank in Germany at the time in North Rhine-Westphalia . Poullain was its first chairman.

After retiring from the DSGV management, Poullain devoted himself to expanding WestLB's market position. Above all, he strengthened the bank's international business. Offices were set up in Luxembourg (1972), London (1973) and New York (1975). In addition, WestLB entered into numerous corporate investments during this time (e.g. Preussag or Gildemeister AG ). In the course of the Poullain affair (see below), he resigned in 1977.

Ludwig Poullain then worked as a consultant, including to Max Grundig . Later he took on functions such as general representative or, most recently, chairman of the supervisory board of Marseille-Kliniken AG in Hamburg at medium-sized companies . He died on February 10, 2015 at the age of 95 in his home in Münster, Westphalia.

Association activity

In 1967 Poullain was also elected President of the German Savings Banks and Giro Association (DSGV). In 1972 he resigned from this office because he was unable to implement his strategy for the business development of the savings bank organization . His successor at the DSGV was Helmut Geiger .

Karlsruhe Sparkassentag 1969

Two years after he took office as DSGV President, his strategy, published and discussed at the Sparkasse Day in Karlsruhe , aimed at a strong and rapid change in the savings bank organization. He called for the savings banks to be "freed from the clutches of paternalism" in politics. He clearly saw the savings bank organization in intensifying competition with the banks. The official status of managers and other employees should be abolished. However, his ideas were very slow and only implemented years later. His resignation as DSGV President in 1972 was a consequence of the slow implementation of his strategy.

Reorganization of the savings bank system

The strategy presented was and will be shortened in public to the phrase “Grandpa's Sparkasse is dead”, which he said he never used. A process of professional and universal management should get under way in the savings banks. Poullain set the course for the technical modernization of the savings banks and the expansion of business to include new products.

Poullain later called for the savings bank system to be restructured in connection with the Hessische Landesbank (Helaba) affair , Frankfurt am Main. Private deposits, mergers into the Landessparkasse or the reallocation to a stock corporation should not be taboo in the discussion.

Poullain Affair 1977

In 1977, a consultancy contract signed by Poullains in 1972 with the later WestLB customer and entrepreneur Franz Josef Schmidt (Constance) became known to the public. Poullain received DM 1 million and later another DM 100,000 from this contract. After Schmidt's Ratio Group got into trouble, WestLB took over his debts in the amount of approx. DM 33 million at the end of 1976. Ludwig Poullain himself had checked and confirmed his creditworthiness. When Schmidt came into custody on suspicion of bankruptcy crimes, WestLB paid the bail of DM 3 million. Ludwig Poullain did not hide the consulting contract and it was also properly taxed, as it later turned out. However, he had not informed the owners of WestLB, who only found out about it during the preliminary investigation.

On December 23, 1977, Ludwig Poullain resigned from his position as CEO of WestLB. On January 17, 1978, WestLB dismissed Poullain without notice for gross breach of duty. The North Rhine-Westphalian Finance Minister Friedrich Halstenberg (SPD) resigned on the same day. Halstenberg was chairman of the WestLB board of directors. In Poullain's circle, the opinion was expressed that it had played a role that Ludwig Poullain had previously remained steadfast towards Prime Minister Heinz Kühn (SPD). Kühn had asked Poullain to refrain from making critical statements in public about the economic policy of the then Chancellor Helmut Schmidt (SPD). Poullain refused the request and insisted on his right to freedom of expression .

The Poullain affair preoccupied the courts. On July 13, 1979, the appeal hearing ended before the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court for the fulfillment of his severance payment agreement in favor of Poullains. In the criminal proceedings for fraud and infidelity, the Münster Regional Court acquitted him on November 16, 1981 on all counts. Poullain did not act as an “ official ” and was therefore allowed to conclude the controversial consultancy contract. The acquittal was later upheld by the Federal Court of Justice . However, the judges saw in the actions of the accused "an objectively unauthorized acceptance of benefits". Nevertheless, they confirmed the acquittal because the accused had subjectively believed that he was acting lawfully and thus the intent was not given. In similar future cases, however, an “acquittal on this basis is no longer an option. According to the current decision of the BGH, the board members of public corporations such as WestLB can no longer be in any doubt that they will have to be treated as civil servants under criminal law. "

Untold speech 2004

In July 2004, Ludwig Poullain hit the headlines of the business press again. He had agreed to give a lecture on the farewell to the CEO of Norddeutsche Landesbank Manfred Bodin . The planned speech on “Bank and Ethos” was canceled at short notice after the text of the speech became known with numerous points of criticism of the existing German banking system and the author was not prepared to change controversial passages. Poullain spoke up about the value of honesty among bankers and in his Philippika showed the difference between a "banker" and a "banker".

The speech, which was originally written for a smaller group, was then published in full in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on July 16, 2004 under the heading “Unhindered speech by an indignant man” .

Aftermath

Ludwig Poullain wrote the strategy for opening up the savings bank organization that was published at the Karlsruhe Sparkasse Day. With the transformation of WestLB from a giro center to an internationally active commercial bank, he made a significant contribution to the fact that the savings bank organization intensified competition with the major and private banks as well as the cooperative banks . The previous delimitation of the business areas between the banking groups has been abandoned. The savings banks and Landesbanken have specifically made business areas of the big banks their own. In the long term, this reorganization and the later opening of the major banks to business with private customers resulted in group competition in the German banking industry. The abolition of state liability for savings banks and Landesbanken, which Poullain called for in 1969, was implemented in 2005 as part of the Brussels Concordance .

Works

• Economic order at risk , German World Economic Society, Berlin 1974
• The savings bank organization , Knapp, Frankfurt / M. 1972
• Activity report , Seewald, Stuttgart-Degerloch 1979, ISBN 3-5120-0532-2 (biography)
• Discontinued speech , in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 163 (2004) of July 16, 2004, p. 9

literature

• Helmut Reuther: Ludwig Poullain , Transcontact Verlag, Bonn 1973 (People of Our Time; Vol. 19)

Web links

• Former head of Landesbank-WestLB has died. In: Westfälische Nachrichten of February 10, 2015

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Harald Freiberger: Banker Ludwig Poullain is dead. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung. February 11, 2015, accessed February 11, 2015 . 
2. ↑ He actually wanted to be a musician ... Obituary in the Nordwest-Zeitung on February 10, 2015 (accessed on February 10, 2015).
3. ↑ On Poullain's statement, see Barbara Hillen: "Grandpa's Sparkasse is dead - or how a sentence made a career" ; in: Sparkasse, issue 3/2002
4. ↑ Customers who have water on their necks ... In: Der Spiegel . No. 26 , 1981 ( online - June 22, 1981 ).
5. ↑ Die Zeit , June 1, 1979, No. 2
6. ^ The Poullain affair and the fall of the finance minister on July 20, 2006
7. ↑ Silence is money
8. ↑ The advisor wasn't just anyone . In: Der Spiegel . No. 48 , 1981 ( online - Nov. 23, 1981 ).
9. ↑ An objectively illicit acceptance of benefits . In: Der Spiegel . No. 11 , 1983 ( online - Mar. 14, 1983 ).
10. ↑ Poullain, Ludwig: Discontinued speech - moral decline in banking. FAZ.net, July 15, 2004, accessed on March 4, 2015 : “Instead of dealing with the prevailing doctrine of the public banking institutions, the 84-year-old former head of the Westdeutsche Landesbank wanted to talk about the Talk about moral decline in the German banking system - which did not happen. We document the indignant speech of an indignant man. "