THE last time I interviewed a boss of Siemens we headlined the piece Auf Wiedersehen, Heinrich. It was a mostly respectful farewell to chief executive Heinrich Von Pierer, stepping down in 2005 after keeping the German engineering giant at the top for over a decade.

If only we had known. Since then, Siemens, Europe’s largest engineering manufacturer, has been plunged into the biggest bribery scandal in corporate history. Slush funds have been uncovered, senior executives face charges, and the company itself - listed in Frankfurt and New York - is threatened with a huge fine from America’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Von Pierer, later chairman, and his successor Klaus Kleinfeld have now left, denying any wrongdoing. The investigation continues, however, as does Siemens’s €72.4 billion (£57.3 billion) revenue business.

For Siemens’s 400,000 global workforce, operating in 180 countries across six sectors - automation, lighting, healthcare, power, transport and communication - the effect must be bewildering. Who would be boss of Siemens now?

Willkommen Peter Löscher, the first nonGerman to head the conglomerate in its 161-year history. Born in Austria and formerly No 2 at drugs giant Merck, Löscher - who started last July - has already achieved one astonishing feat, keeping the business on track while comprehensively remodelling Siemens’s senior executive structure.

The company is now reorganised into three groups - industry, energy and healthcare - and many of its top executives have gone. Löscher lists the numbers in his German-accented English.

“Eleven out of twenty people on the supervisory board are new, six out of eight on the management board are new, and on the next level down, nine out of fifteen are new. Fundamental change.”

Then he gives a tight grimace. Tall, stern and grey, Löscher, 50, was hired to overhaul the company’s culture, and he has set about it with grim gusto. Before Merck, he worked at Siemens’s great rival GE.

Talking through these changes in an anteroom at London’s City Hall, he gives the impression of a man moving methodically through tangled undergrowth. Answers come readily, his face betrays little, only his hand rapping the table like a machete chop, emphasising each point, betrays his bottled-up emotion.

After hacking through the senior team, the workforce is next. Within a fortnight the company is expected to announce 17,000 job cuts, part of Löscher’s drive to make the group more profitable.

He also promises another twist: to make the company less German in feel, while simultaneously plugging German engineering excellence through its global network.

Hence his visit to London last week, where Siemens hired City Hall for its annual media summit. It is the first such summit to be held outside Siemens’s German base and follows Löscher’s GE-style remodelling of the company’s top-tier framework.