MUNICH, Feb 13 (Reuters) - The outgoing head of Allianz AG said on Thursday the future of its Dresdner Bank unit as a whole entity was not in question, a possible stay of execution for its ailing investment banking arm.
"Dresdner Bank as a whole will not come into question," Chief Executive Henning Schulte-Noelle said on Thursday, according to the text of a speech to be given at a university event in Bochum in western Germany.
He said Allianz would stick to its previous strategy of offering asset management and banking services alongside insurance, but said there was still "homework" to be done at its corporate client and investment banking businesses.
Schulte-Noelle told a German newspaper on Wednesday all options would be open for the loss-making Dresdner unit if it failed to turn a profit.
His comments come after years of speculation about the future of Dresdner's poorly performing investment banking arm, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, and pave the way for his successor, board member Michael Diekmann, to wield the axe.
The 24-billion-euro ($26 billion) acquisition of Dresdner Bank in 2001 has soured the last days of Schulte-Noelle's 11-year term of office. The German bank, slow to adapt to the worst downturn in 50 years, has helped weaken Allianz's battered stock price.
The logic behind the acquisition of Dresdner, which came after a Dresdner tie-up with Deutsche Bank fell through due to an overlap in investment banking, was to allow Allianz to sell more insurance products through Dresdner's retail bank branches.
Allianz stock, which has lost 75 percent of its value since the start of 2002, was up 0.24 percent at 66.31 euros by 1806 GMT, compared to a 0.1-percent rise in the DJ Stoxx European insurance index .