former Deutsche Bank risk officer has refused his share of a $16.5 million award from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for reporting misdeeds. Eric Ben-Artzi accuses the SEC of not going after executives, but hitting lower-ranked employees.

• “But Deutsche did not commit this wrongdoing. Deutsche was the victim. To be precise, the bank’s shareholders and its rank-and-file employees who are now losing their jobs in droves are the primary victims,” Ben-Artzi wrote in op-ed .

• According to the whistleblower, the fine should be paid by certain executives, not by shareholders.

• Ben-Artzi was one of the three whistleblowers to report an improper accounting at Deutsche in 2010 and 2011. The bank was fined $55 million in total, of which Ben-Artzi was due a 15 percent share of the fine – or half of the 30 percent allocated to the whistleblowers  which he is refusing to take.

• The whistleblower award was launched by SEC in 2011 to encourage people with insider knowledge to speak about financial crimes. Ben-Artzi is the first person to refuse the award.

• Deutsche Bank Chief Executive Officer John Cryan has pledged to clean up the balance sheet and resolve major legal issues to help return the bank to profit. The bank has spent more than $10.5 billion on fines and legal settlements since the start of 2008, calculations by Bloomberg show. The company had 5.5 billion euros ($6.2 billion) of provisions for outstanding penalties at the end of June, according to its filings.

Deutsche Bank:
Headquarters: Frankfurt, Germany
CEO: John Cryan