Fired employee sues Deutsche over whistleblowing

Gary DeDilectis, who worked in operations, filed the lawsuit against the bank Wednesday afternoon in U.S. district court in Manhattan. Deutsche Bank spokesman Duncan King says the claims are "without merit."

DeDilectis says he was fired in January 2012. The bank refused to give him a reason, he says, though he asked multiple times.

DeDilectis says that around August 2010, he noticed operational problems plaguing the bank. Among them: The bank failed to invest adequately in its systems, causing outages. As a result, paper statements were sometimes mailed to the wrong address or the wrong customer, and the bank failed to keep money for its own trading separate from customers' money, he says.

Sometimes, DeDilectis says, the bank couldn't reconcile its accounts: One 24-hour outage resulted in a $6 billion discrepancy between the previous day's account balances and "undetermined" transactions. Just before Thanksgiving 2011, a systems upgrade over the weekend caused about $1 million in overcharges to customers. DeDilectis says those customers were never notified. King said the bank has been working with its clients to rectify the overcharges since it became aware of the problem.