(Bloomberg) -- Deutsche Bank AG investor frustration with Chairman Paul Achleitner came to the fore on Thursday as more shareholders withheld their backing and several urged him to take responsibility for the lender’s woes and step down.

Achleitner, 62, faced a barrage of criticism at the bank’s annual general meeting, with shareholders highlighting the dismal performance of the bank’s shares after they reached a fresh all-time low just before the chairman opened the meeting. While investors still backed him with 72% of the share capital at the meeting, that’s down from more than 84% last year. Support for Chief Executive Officer Christian Sewing declined as well.

“Mr. Achleitner, the restructuring of the bank hasn’t been completed and profitability continues to be something to be desired despite multiple management changes over the past seven years,” said Andreas Thomae, a portfolio manager with Deka Investment, a top investor in Deutsche Bank who planned to vote against the supervisory board actions.

Achleitner has overseen multiple turnaround efforts by three different management teams. Shares of the lender lost about three-quarters since the the former Allianz SE finance chief took over in 2012. Some of Deutsche Bank’s largest investors had grown dissatisfied ahead of the bank’s shareholder meeting and had discussed ways for the chairman to find a successor before the end of his term in 2022, people familiar with the matter have said.

Chief Executive Officer Christian Sewing received 75% of votes, down from 95% a year ago. Sewing at the meeting announced plans for “tough cutbacks” to the investment bank in a campaign to restore market confidence following the breakdown of takeover talks with Commerzbank AG.

“I can assure you: we are prepared to make tough cutbacks” to the securities unit, Sewing said Thursday at the bank’s annual shareholders’ meeting in Frankfurt. The CEO said he’s “rigorously focusing” on building up profitable and growing businesses.

Achleitner is seen as a backer of a large investment banking unit at Deutsche Bank, having advised the lender on its Wall Street expansion in the 1990s when he was an investment banker at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. But new regulations after the financial crisis have made the business costlier to conduct, while negative interest rates in Europe erode other sources of income. Since he took over as chairman, Deutsche Bank has made a series of smaller cutbacks to the securities unit, while shying away from more decisive measures.

Achleitner said while he had made mistakes, he was not “the root cause of all evil.” He opened the meeting by assuring Sewing, whom he installed last year after a bitter boardroom battle with his predecessor, of his full backing.

Sewing didn’t say where the cuts to the investment bank would be, but he highlighted businesses where they’re unlikely to happen, such as origination and advisory as well as as foreign exchange, global credit trading and U.S. commercial real estate. He didn’t mention equities trading, an omission that was intentional, according to a person familiar with the matter.

To contact the reporters on this story: Steven Arons in Frankfurt at sarons@bloomberg.net;Nicholas Comfort in Frankfurt at ncomfort1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Dale Crofts at dcrofts@bloomberg.net, Christian Baumgaertel, Sree Vidya Bhaktavatsalam

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