Deutsche Börse chief: We will be fine without the London Stock Exchange

Deutsche Börse chief executive Carsten Kengeter on Wednesday spoke for the first time of his “regret” at the London Stock Exchange’s move effectively to kill off their £21 billion merger.

The LSE’s decision to refuse a last-minute EU request to sell part of its Italian business has meant the deal is now widely thought to be dead.

Kengeter said: “We regret this development. the logic of this merger is still very clear to us.”

He added he was confident of Deutsche’s future as standalone business.

“It is pointless to me to speculate on what the reasons behind our merger partner’s decision were,” he told an audience in Frankfurt. “We feel very well-prepared as a company for the future.”

The LSE stunned its German counterpart late on Sunday when it said it refused to comply with a sudden Brussels competition request to offload its Italian trading arm MTS.

The Germans were not consulted about the LSE’s decision, taken after a mammoth weekend-long board meeting.

Kengeter said “standing still is not an option”, adding he stood by the decision to try and merge with the LSE.

Friday will see his opposite number Xavier Rolet grilled on the deal’s collapse and his future plans for an independent LSE.

Speculation is rising that the exchange will now merge with a a US exchange giant.

The German chief, an Anglophile who has a home in Wimbledon, has been embroiled in an insider trading probe in Germany over his purchase of Deutsche Börse shares last year before the merger was announced.

He has denied any wrongdoing, with both LSE and Deutsche boards backing him.

The inquiry has, however, cast a shadow over his leadership of the deal in Germany.

Sources close to both exchanges have speculated that the European Commission demand over Italy was politically motivated after Kengeter refused German demands to try to base the holding company in Frankfurt.

The Commission has also been blamed by the LSE for tabling demands to sell MTS at too late a stage.

However, the commission hit back at LSE and indicated the exchange operator should have known its competition tests could have raised the possibility that MTS may have been a problem.