NEWSMAKER-Another BMW executive goes, this time to Deutsche

By Christiaan Hetzner

WOLFSBURG, Germany, March 13 (Reuters) - BMW's (BMWG.DE), the world's largest premium car maker, has lost another of its highly sought-after executives in Stefan Krause.

Deutsche Bank (DBKGn.DE) has poached Krause, once a leading candidate to become BMW's CEO back in 2006, appointing him to replace 64-year-old Anthony di Iorio -- who retires on Oct. 1 -- as chief financial officer.

Krause will join the likes of Linde's (LING.DE) Wolfgang Reitzle, Infineon's (IFXGn.DE) Wolfgang Ziebart, General Motor's (GM.N) Carl-Peter Forster and Bernd Pischetsrieder, formerly of Volkswagen (VOWG.DE), among BMW's high profile departures.

Head of sales and marketing at BMW since October, Krause started at the Bavarian carmaker in 1987, spending most of his career at various posts in its finance services business in the United States, eventually rising in 2002 to the post of CFO.

Fluent in English, Krause can also speak perfect Spanish since he was born in Columbia, where he grew up.

Were it not for his fading hair, Krause's boyish, almost cherubic face would belie his 45 years of age, and his youth could go a long way in representing a generational shift at Deutsche, Germany's largest listed lender.

Once at the bank, Krause will confront the challenge of pushing its business in a more difficult market environment where investors in debt products, a Deutsche speciality, are thinning out following the subprime mortgage crisis.

The BMW executive, married with two daughters, is not without his critics, however.

He has been the public face of BMW's much maligned currency hedging strategy that essentially took a risky bet years ago that the appreciation of the euro would be short lived.

Krause chose not to take out any long-term hedges out of the conviction Europe's single currency would return to parity to the dollar in terms of purchasing power, which he usually quoted as being around $1.20.

Instead the euro's inexorable rise to Thursday's record high above $1.56 has cost BMW some 1.6 billion euros in pretax profit during the three years through 2006.

Although the company has repeatedly denied it, this could have played a key role in his recent switch to head up sales, and further possibly even being passed up as CEO in favour of production boss and engineer Norbert Reithofer late in 2006.

If Deutsche was really looking for a financial wizard, the bank would not have had to go any further than Holger Haerter of BMW rival Porsche (PSHG_p.DE), who is universally respected for his expertise in weaving an elaborate web of derivative hedges to cover everything from currencies to stock options.

While his expertise helped Porsche earns hundreds of millions of euros annually and lent the company a reputation for being a hedge fund with a captive automotive business, Haerter was probably too expensive with a paycheck likely to easily exceed that of Deutsche CEO Josef Ackermann. (Reporting by Christiaan Hetzner, additional reporting by John O'Donnell in Frankfurt; Editing by Mike Elliott)