Siemens goes outside for new CEO

The scandal-rocked industrial giant Siemens has gone outside for a new CEO. Peter Loescher, a senior exec at Merck and, previously, General Electric, was picked over the weekend to succeed Klaus Kleinfeld, whose contract was not renewed. Besides its involvement in enterprise and infrastructure telecom, Siemens is a leader in in many industrial and medical fields; think of a German GE without the media properties but with telecom and you've got the right scale. Siemens is under investigation for allegedly assembling a half-billion-dollar slush fund from which it paid bribes to government officials around the world. Siemens says it's innocent of wrongdoing; still, Kleinfeld's office was raided by investigators a few months ago.

For more about Loescher and his new company:
- read this article from the WSJ (sub. req.)