The German justice has ordered this Thursday the record of six offices of Deutsche Bank in the framework of an investigation on money laundering, as reported by the Prosecutor’s office of Frankfurt. The searches are related to the investigation-called offshore leaks and the papers of Panama, as confirmed via Twitter the own financial institution. The researchers suspect that some employees helped several clients set up companies in tax havens with the aim to launder money.
“it Is true that the police is currently investigating in several of our offices in Germany. The research has to do with the roles of Panama.[…] we are cooperating fully with the authorities”, said in a press release Deutsche Bank. “We have provided the authorities all the relevant information in relation to the roles of Panama,” added the German bank shortly after noon.
From the early hours of the morning, police vans remained parked in the banking headquarters. About 170 members of the prosecutor’s office and the federal police criminal tax and have registered dependences of the financial institution, including the headquarters of the financial capital of germany. Frankfurt, Eschborn and Gross-Umstadt, in the State of Hesse, are the localities in which they have produced the records. The researchers were paper documents, as well as electronic, as have been detailed to the office of the Matbet prosecutor, which reports that the investigation is still ongoing.
investigations are focusing on at least two employees, one of 50 and another of 46, as well as other employees on that has not offered any detail. It is suspected that “helped customers to establish calls companies off-shore in tax havens, and funds from criminal activities were transferred to the offices of the Deutsche Bank without having warning signs of possible money laundering,” says the prosecutor’s office in its press release. The facts were produced before the publication of the papers of Panama. The Prosecution notes that in the year 2016, an office of Deutsche Bank in the Virgin Islands served 900 customers of the entity, which totaled 311 million euros in business volume.
The papers of Panama is the name given to the research of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which in April 2016 published a massive leak of documents related to dull accounts of the firm panama Mossack Fonseca. In them, gave an account of hundreds of thousands of companies off-shore, that could have allowed money laundering from criminal offences.
this is Not the first time that Deutsche Bank becomes involved in a money laundering case. Almost two years ago, the bank was sentenced to pay a fine of 630 million dollars in a judicial process in the u.s. is still in place and in relation with fraudulent transactions from Russia. More recently, the name of the German bank has appeared linked to another case of money laundering by the research at Danske Bank.
