Klaus Kleinfeld will leave Siemens. New chairman of the Supervisory Board Gerhard Cromme is following Heinrich von Pierer who resigned. The IG-Metall members of the Supervisory Board of Siemens AG released following declaration on these personal changes.

The Supervisory Board of Siemens AG is today once again being faced with difficult decisions, well aware of the fact that these decisions will stake out the path of future development for Siemens AG and its employees.

As employee representatives, we view our task to be to help ensure the enterprise has a solid management which can ensure the Siemens Group a stable company development focused on the future, in this manner safeguarding production sites and jobs at Siemens AG.

To this end it is absolutely necessary for the current process of investigating the accusations of corruption to be carried on with the same intensity as to date. At the same time we expect Siemens to draw the right conclusions from all this and create a model of good corporate governance.

The employee representatives do not have any doubt that Mr. Kleinfeld has provided intensive support for this ongoing process. We regret very much that Mr. Kleinfeld will no longer be available to the company in the capacity of chairman of the Management Board.

The employee representatives would furthermore like to thank Mr. von Pierer for his dedication and commitment to the Group and its employees.

The representatives of the employees will make the pending decisions in a careful, circumspect manner. By the same token, the employee representatives expect issues relating to staff to first be addressed by the Supervisory Board and not leaked to the process to be discussed in the public arena.

Co-determination and social justice are key elements in an evolving culture on the Supervisory Board of Siemens. These are essential factors required to secure the competitiveness of the enterprise. We expect that these institutions will continue to be upheld and further developed by all the members of the Supervisory Board and Management Board in the interest of the employees of Siemens in the future as well.

 

Berthold Huber, Ralf Heckmann, Lothar Adler, Bettina Haller, Heinz Hawreliuk, Dieter Scheitor, Birgit Grube