Transparency

The people at WestLB are fascinating.
Or is bringing to question the German regulatory system.

They suddenly announced this week that it had a 14 per cent stake in Daimler Chrysler! and nobody knew about it. Well they had not disclosed it up to this week. Regardless of when they bought the shares it is normal practice to be open when you own a huge stake in another company - well they did not see why they should do that, even when they clearly heading to be the largest shareholder?

At least they had a good reason for non-disclosure by blaming the new disclosure rules in Germany for the incident.
If 14 per cent is not material then what is material? Remember the Safaricom debacle - all along there was someone else holding shares and we thought only two groups existed. How naive of use to think that accounting rules would ensure transparency!

The reason the WestLB story is interesting is the previous week they lost 100m Euris in a failed speculation in the VW shares. A few heads did roll.