{"id":2077,"date":"2018-12-09T08:04:24","date_gmt":"2018-12-09T08:04:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/euromenaenergy.com\/?p=2077"},"modified":"2018-12-09T08:04:24","modified_gmt":"2018-12-09T08:04:24","slug":"deutsche-bank-raided-in-money-laundering-probe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/?p=2077","title":{"rendered":"Deutsche Bank raided in money-laundering probe"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Bloomberg\/Berlin<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

German authorities descended on Deutsche Bank AG, including its downtown Frankfurt headquarters, in a co-ordinated raid related to a money-laundering investigation.
\nMore than six police vehicles, their blue lights flashing, pulled up to Deutsche Bank\u2019s main offices shortly before 9am, in an operation involving about 170 officers. The main suspects in the probe stemming from 2016 disclosures known as the Panama Papers were two bank employees who were not identified beyond their ages \u2014 50 and 46. Authorities seized documents and electronic files and said they were also looking at whether others might have been involved.
\n\u201cAs far as we are concerned, we have already provided the authorities with all the relevant information regarding the Panama Papers,\u201d Deutsche Bank spokesman Joerg Eigendorf told reporters in Frankfurt.
\nFor the beleaguered German lender, the raid adds to a panoply of headaches \u2014 commercial, regulatory and legal \u2014 facing chief executive officer Christian Sewing and chairman Paul Achleitner. The stock has lost almost half its value this year, after sliding about 3% yesterday. The cost of insuring its junior debt against losses jumped 11 basis points to 383 basis points, the highest in two years, according to data compiled by CMA.
\n\u201cThis must be associated with criminal behaviour and not just a trivial offence,\u201d said Stefan Mueller chief executive officer of DGWA, an investment advisory boutique based in Frankfurt. He believes the bank will now be paralysed for months until it becomes clear how it will be affected by new potential fines.
\n\u201cMaybe this time, Achleitner will fall. The bank needs fresh blood to make a radical cut at its management.\u201d
\nPolice vehicles were present outside Deutsche Bank HQ in Frankfurt amidst raids by prosecutors over money laundering probe.
\nThe Panama Papers refer to a collection of documents leaked in 2016 from Mossack Fonseca, a Panama-based law firm that created shell companies to facilitate tax avoidance. At the time, Deutsche Bank severed ties with a Cypriot lender partly owned by VTB Group that was identified in the reporting.
\nThe subsequent investigations exposed evidence Deutsche Bank helped clients set up off-shore accounts, prosecutors said. The officials said the Thursday raid wasn\u2019t related to its role as a correspondent bank for money laundering at Denmark\u2019s Danske Bank.
\nThe German lender may have helped clients in setting up offshore companies in tax havens. Money obtained illegally may have been transferred to accounts at Deutsche Bank, which failed to report the suspicions that the accounts may have been used to launder money, Frankfurt prosecutors said. The investigation is focused on a Deutsche Bank unit based on the British Virgin Islands, which dealt with more than 900 clients and processed \u20ac311mn ($354mn) in 2016 alone, according to the prosecutors.
\nThe timing of the raid inflicts more pain on Deutsche Bank after a series of setbacks and repeated failures in keeping misconduct in check have pushed the shares to all-time lows. Investor worries have mounted over its role as a correspondent bank in the multi-billion-dollar money-laundering scandal at Danske, and Germany\u2019s markets regulator has taken the unprecedented step of appointing a monitor to oversee the firm\u2019s efforts to improve money-laundering and terrorism-financing controls.
\nDeutsche Bank has spent more than $18bn paying fines and settling legal disputes since the start of 2008, according to company disclosures compiled by Bloomberg News. In Europe, Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc is the only lender to have faced a bigger tab, at $18.1bn, the Bloomberg calculations show.
\n\u201cJust when you thought Deutsche Bank had left it\u2019s legal troubles behind it, there\u2019s more,\u201d said Markus Riesselmann, an analyst at Independent Research who recommends investors sell Deutsche Bank shares.
\n\u201cInvestors really want to be able to focus on the bank\u2019s operating business, so this noise around them is quite unhelpful for the mood.\u201d
\nSewing, who took the top job in April, is replacing key executives as part of a management shakeup as he struggles to get Germany\u2019s biggest lender back on track.
\nSylvie Matherat, a management board member who serves as the bank\u2019s chief regulatory officer, and Tom Patrick, who runs operations in the Americas, are among executives who might ultimately leave, people familiar with the matter said this week.
\nIn a June 2017 interview, Matherat described the monumental task of modernizing the company\u2019s compliance methods. After years of acquisitions and overseas expansion, the lender was left with a patchwork of computer programs to monitor transactions. The bank didn\u2019t have a complete picture of the compliance controls in the organisation\u2019s businesses and regions, she said.
\n\u201cI hate surprises, but you don\u2019t know what you don\u2019t know,\u201d said Matherat, a lawyer and former deputy director general at the French central bank.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bloomberg\/Berlin German authorities descended on Deutsche Bank AG, including its downtown Frankfurt headquarters, in a co-ordinated raid related to a money-laundering investigation. More than six police vehicles, their blue lights flashing, pulled…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2087,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[46,57,90,96,107,137,139,160,174,184,201,202,209,232,233,244,246,249,256,267,277,279,288],"class_list":["post-2077","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-aramco","tag-baroudi","tag-democracy","tag-doha","tag-embargo","tag-gas","tag-gazprom","tag-international-maritime-disputes","tag-lebanon","tag-maritime-disputes","tag-offshore","tag-oil","tag-opec","tag-putin","tag-qatar","tag-rosneft","tag-roudi","tag-russia","tag-saudi","tag-straddling-hydrocarbons-reserves","tag-total","tag-trump","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2077","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2077"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2077\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2087"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}