Eric Ben-Artzi, a former Deutsche Bank risk officer who helped expose false accounting at the lender, has said he refused an $8.25 million reward from the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Ben-Artzi expressed concern that top executives involved in wrongdoing at Germany’s largest lender have gone unpunished while shareholders have been left to pay. He wrote in a Financial Times opinion article on Friday that he declined his share of the $16.5 million payout that the US Securities and Exchange Commission offered for his information about Deutsche Bank's overvaluation of a derivatives portfolio at the height of the financial crisis.

“I will not join the looting of the very people I was hired to protect,” he wrote. He said that executives, not shareholders, should pay the fine and also highlighted the “revolving door” of senior personnel between the SEC and Germany’s largest bank.

“This goes beyond the typical revolving-door story. In this case, top SEC lawyers had held senior posts at the bank, moving in and out of top positions at the SEC even as the investigations into malfeasance at Deutsche Bank were ongoing.”

The $55 million fine that the bank paid in a settlement, which was announced by the SEC in May last year, penalised shareholders while top executives retired with their multi-million dollar bonuses intact, he wrote in the column.

Ben-Artzi sued the bank for wrongful dismissal in 2012. All of the management board members who led the company at the time have since left, according to Bloomberg's reports.