The SAP founder and chairman of the supervisory board Hasso Plattner will resign in the coming year. CEO Christian Klein will then be controlled by Punit Renjen.
(Photo: via REUTERS)
SAP has found an absolute top manager to replace the outgoing chairman of the board Hasso Plattner. So much for the positive part of the news.
The negative: The matter has a rather bland aftertaste. Because the guidelines for good corporate governance were largely ignored in the succession plan.
Punit Renjen, the ex-boss of the consulting firm Deloitte, undoubtedly has stature. But once again the impression arises that the candidate was found more by luck and coincidence in the extended circle of friends than through an organized search process.
Investors have been demanding for years that Plattner, who is now 79, should arrange his successor. A structured process was rightly called for. There is a good reason for a German Corporate Governance Code (DCGK) that provides recommendations for this. According to this, a competence profile should first be created for the entire committee and then covered by individual members. That sounds simple and like a procedure that every investor can easily understand.
After a fruitless search in-house, there were also such criteria at SAP. But criteria that Plattner himself once mentioned – namely that his successor should speak German and know SAP Germany – apparently no longer played a role in the end.
In fact, Plattner was lucky that CEO Christian Klein suggested a candidate himself just in time, or at least brought it up. And that can really make you suspicious.
The opposite of good corporate governance at SAP
The fact that the CEO can choose his controller is the opposite of good corporate governance. Because this approach leads the whole supervisory board concept ad absurdum. And the corporate governance talk anyway.
In any case, the relationship of many listed companies to the code is fairly indifferent: The only thing they have to do when they violate the so-called “soft law” is to justify them.
That’s how you keep it. That’s how the federal government set an example: As the largest shareholder in the postal service, it accepted that CEO Frank Appel also became chairman of the supervisory board at Telekom. The DCGK also contradicts such an accumulation of offices. Since then, at the latest, the code can no longer be taken seriously.
In the case of SAP, Renjen can and must now prove that the software company’s board of directors is not really best friends. You have to worry more about the DCGK. He’s lost even more credibility now.
More: SAP chief supervisor Plattner on his successor – “It is difficult to find someone with the reputation”