Daimler Investors push for independent chairman

Frankfurt

Investors welcomed former Daimler chief executive Dieter Zetsche’s decision to forego his role as chairman of the German carmaker, announced at the weekend, and starting a race to find an independent head of the company’s supervisory board.

Zetsche, 67, a former head of the Mercedes-Benz brand, was due to take a seat as chairman of the board of directors at the Stuttgart-based company after a two-year cooling-off period. In a surprise move, he announced in an interview in Sunday newspaper the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung that he would renounce his position, breaking a decades-old practice among German companies of promoting board members to directors. Now Manfred Bischoff, Daimler’s current chairman needs to find a new successor candidate before he retires on March 31, 2021.