Deutsche Bank raided in laundering case
BERLIN — Some 170 police officers, investigators and prosecutors raided the German offices of Deutsche Bank on Thursday on the suspicion bank employees helped clients set up offshore companies in tax havens to launder hundreds of millions of dollars.
The investigation emerged from an analysis of documents leaked from tax havens in recent years, including the 2016 “Panama Papers,” said Frankfurt prosecutors’ spokeswoman Nadja Niesen.
It is focused on two bank workers, both German citizens, and possibly other suspects, she said.
Niesen said the analysis of the Panama Papers and other documents “gave rise to suspicion that Deutsche Bank was helping clients set up socalled offshore companies in tax havens and the proceeds of crimes were transferred there from Deutsche Bank accounts” without the bank reporting it.
In 2016, over 900 customers are alleged to have transferred $351 million to one such company set up in the British Virgin Islands, she said. The suspects are accused of failing to report the suspicious transactions even though there was “sufficient evidence” to have been aware of it.
Deutsche Bank was fined more than $600 million by U.S. and U.K. authorities in January 2017 for allowing customers to transfer $10 billion out of Russia in what regulators said was “highly suggestive of financial crime.”
The Panama Papers are a trove of documents from a law firm that handled shell companies for thousands of the rich and powerful around the world. While owning a shell company is not illegal, it is used to hide the beneficial owner of a company or transfer, making it important for the handling and laundering of dirty money.
Latvia has also emerged as a major hub of money laundering.