Biography
Dr. Sabine Scholz-Fröhling
General Counsel, Head of Legal & Group Compliance, Managing Director
FMS Wertmanagement AÖR

Team size: 10

Sabine is a managing director for FMS Wertmanagement AÖR (FMS WM) in Munich. She covers the role of general counsel, head of legal and group compliance. FMS WM was founded in 2010 as the federally owned winding-up institution to counteract the consequences of the Lehman Brothers collapse. FMS WM currently records approximately EUR €50bn assets under management in about 30 countries, with total assets of EUR €90bn. Sabine joined FMS WM in October 2020 in the 20th year of her career, now leading a team of 10 employees across two locations: Munich and Dublin.

Sabine always drives the regulatory strategy in her respective position to success and achieves results that had been judged highly unlikely before. In her current role, she achieved savings in the overall wind-down plan as well as the comprehensive exemption of FMS WM from European banking regulation. In her previous role at Fidor Bank AG in Munich, she built and managed relationships with cryptocurrency exchanges, at that time being the first and only head of legal across Germany supporting cryptocurrency business. In her previous role at Hamburger Sparkasse, she managed to secure a very unexpected verdict by the German Federal Court of Justice, ending the “Kick-Back” jurisdiction in Germany, which had impacted the banking industry for years.

As a compliance lead, she is highly experienced with risk and crisis management of all kinds, including the impacts resulting from the Ukraine crisis and the general rise of cyber risks. She successfully prevented major risk realisations.

Sabine is a very strong leader with the capability to successfully manage change in people, teams, and organisations. This capability is significant for any business organisation in the future. Her thinking goes far beyond technical legal topics but always strongly focuses on shaping the overall strategy of her respective employer. In her current role, she actively works on the FMS WM organisation winding itself down – a rare process within the industry at present, but one that might become more important in the future.

Some of her team’s recent achievements include the legal support required for the successful sale, restructuring, or actively induced repayment of assets, some of which are worth three-digit million amounts; the execution of a comprehensive risk and change analysis covering a prospective transformational change in the organisation and operations of FMS WM; and ongoing legal support for major public procurement proceedings.

Sabine has 23 years of experience in the banking sector, mostly as a key point of contact for regulators such as BaFin, the ECB, and the FIU. She has repeatedly published, most recently in the CCZ journal: “Der Mehrfachbeauftragte – Vorüberlegungen zu einem allgemeinen Recht des Beauftragten.” She is active as a speaker, for example, at the annual conference of the FIU.

Since 2012, Sabine has been part of the “Compliance Verband” (BvdCM), of which she became an associate member of the chairman’s committee in 2015. She is also a member of the Tax and Legal Excellence Lounge Munich. Just recently, she founded an association organising cultural events in a small castle near Regensburg.