The German government will discuss a new law to imprison bank executives for up to five years if they are found guilty of reckless behaviour that put a bank at risk. “We've found a regulatory gap here that we want to close,” a senior government official in Berlin said on Monday.
According to the draft regulation to amend Germany's banking law, which the Cabinet will discuss on Monday, a manager may face a jail sentence if he deliberately ignored risk rules and thereby risked the collapse of a financial institution.
The Cabinet is also due to take up Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble's plans to force big banks to separate their riskier trading activities from their deposit-taking business.