The Government Commission on the German Corporate Governance Code has amended the Code, most recently in May 2003. Following this revision, the contents of Deutsche Bank’s Corporate Governance Principles and the Code were nearly the same. For this reason, the Board of Managing Directors and Supervisory Board agreed to repeal Deutsche Bank’s own Corporate Governance Principles (October 29, 2003). Instead, we included regulations of the Code in the Terms of Reference for the Board of Managing Directors as well as the Supervisory Board and its committees. These are also available to the general public at http: //www.deutsche-bank.com/corporate-governance .
Additional measures in 2003 served to comply with the requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the SEC’s implementation rules. These measures range from the improvement of internal controls through a detailed certification procedure up to a newly issued Code of Ethics. Furthermore, we set up a procedure to regulate the handling of complaints relating to accounting, internal accounting controls and auditing matters (often referred to as the “whistleblower protection policy”).