German police raid bank offices

Probe of money laundering at Deutsche Bank

• German authorities raided Deutsche Bank’s headquarters Thursday amid suspicions that its employees helped clients set up offshore companies that were used to launder hundreds of millions of euros.

About 170 police officers, investigators and prosecutors swooped in on the bank’s offices in Frankfurt and premises in nearby Eschborn and Gross-Umstadt at 10 a.m., seizing electronic and paper records.

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 Deutsche Bank employees, aged 50 and 46, and possibly other still unidentified suspects, she said. At least one site raided was a suspect’s home.

Analysis of the Panama Papers and other documents “gave rise to suspicion that Deutsche Bank was helping clients set up so-called offshore companies in tax havens and the proceeds of crimes were transferred there from Deutsche Bank accounts” without the bank reporting it, Niesen said.

In 2016 alone, more than 900 customers are alleged to have transferred some 311 million euros (US$351 million) to one such company set up in the British Virgin Islands, she said.

The suspects, both German citizens, are accused of failing to report the suspicious transactions even though there was “sufficient evidence” to have been aware of it.

Deutsche Bank confirmed the search and said “the investigation has to do with the Panama Papers case.”

“More details will be communicated as soon as these become known. We are cooperating fully with the authorities,” the bank said.

Money laundering has become a growing problem in Europe, where a series of scandals has exposed lax regulation.

And it’s not the first time Deutsche Bank has run into trouble over the flow of dirty money.

It was fined more than US$600 million by U.S. and U.K. authorities in January 2017 for allowing customers to transfer US$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 rich and powerful clients 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.