It’s related to a money-laundering investigation going back to the Panama Papers.
German authorities searched Deutsche Bank ’s Frankfurt headquarters for a second straight day on Friday as part of an ongoing money-laundering probe into the country’s largest bank.
Over 150 police officers and federal tax authorities raided Deutsche Bank’s headquarters and five other sites in the area on Thursday. The search area included board members’ offices and one employee’s home and continued into Friday.
The investigation is focused on two Deutsche Bank employees, identified only by their ages, and potentially others who are suspected of helping their clients create offshore accounts and failing to alert the authorities of suspicious transactions.
Basically, when they saw something fishy, they were supposed to say something — and they allegedly didn’t.
The raids are related to the Panama Papers, a huge trove of documents exposing a global web of money laundering and tax evasion that were leaked in 2016.
If you feel like you’ve heard of Deutsche Bank behaving badly in the past, that’s because you probably have. The lender has faced tens of millions of dollars in fines from authorities in the United States and Europe in recent years, for misdeeds ranging from money laundering and Russian “ mirror trading ” to misleading investors in its sale of mortgage-backed securities. As part of the mirror-trading scheme, Deutsche Bank helped clients get billions of dollars out of Russia by letting them buy stocks in Moscow in rubles and selling the same quantity of shares in London in dollars, thus transferring rubles into dollars.
The German bank also has ties to President Donald Trump and is one of the few financial entities that will still lend him money. It has also extended loans to Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner, and last year it reportedly received a request from special counsel Robert Mueller’s team asking for information on financial transactions made by Trump and his associates.
But it doesn’t look like the current raids have anything to do with Trump.
