Mannerisms

This, of course, is Infineon, a company where the shenanigans of its supervisory board have been entertaining the German press, and the rest of us, for the last six years ever since it backed a management coup to remove founding CEO Dr Ulrich Schumacher.

On Thursday, Feb 11, the UK fund-manager Hermes will bring to a climax its campaign to oust chairman-designate Klaus Wucherer who, for ten years was a member of the supervisory board and is the anointed appointee of out-going Chairman Max-Dietrich Kley.

Hermes, and several other institutional shareholders, notably Germany's largest mutual fund DWS, BNY Mellon and Legal and General Insurance are supporting the rival candidacy of Willi Berchtold, the CFO of an auto parts manufacturer called ZF Friedrichshafen which is an Infineon customer.

Formal objections to Wucherer centre around his paying €500,000 to Siemens to settle a bribery allegation.

Kley told shareholders: "No individual transgressions have been identified either in his own conduct or in the areas for which he was responsible."

At the end of last month, Wucherer tried to soothe the situation by saying that, if elected, he would only serve for one year.

Hermes rejected this attempt to get the matter dropped.

Kley and Wucherer have been on Infineon's supervisory board during an unsavoury period in which Schumacher was summarily ejected, a public row with Schumacher's successor Dr Wolfgang Ziebart was fuelled by the supervisory board with unseemly comments in German newspapers leading to Ziebart's resignation, and private equity funds were approached - notwithstanding the appalling effect PE funds have had on the chip business.

So Thursday should be entertaining.