Siemens Execs:Down, Down...

Earlier in the week, the chairman of Siemens' board stepped down, because he was in charge when the 160-year-old German industrial and electronics manufacturer spent a half-billion dollars on bribes and other illegal payments over seven years.

Today, the company's CEO also resigned. "Although cleared of any wrongdoing, Kleinfeld's future had hung in the balance as the Siemens' board considered whether far-reaching changes of the group's management were necessary to help give the group a new start as it contended with an ongoing slush-fund probe," reports Deutsche Welle.

The company, who is due to own UGS by month's end, is highly profitable: Q2 profits were up 35% to e1.3 billion, and revenues up 10% to e20.6 billion.

Update

Roger Boyes of The Times has this additional information of interest to CAD users:

The coup against him appears to have been engineered by Josef Ackermann, the Swiss-born chief executive of Deutsche Bank, who is a Siemens nonexecutive director. The banker’s concern was that the corruption scandals would seriously complicate the relationship of Siemens with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

Under Mr Kleinfeld, Siemens has been buying up companies in America, its latest acquisition being UGS, an industrial software company. Increasingly, questions were being raised in the United States about how aware management was of the corruption affairs.