Deutsche Bank’s Frankfurt HQ was raided by 170 officers on Thursday morning in light of a money laundering investigation involving €311 million of illicit cash, the New York Times report.
Two individuals, aged 50 and 46, are suspected of failing to report possible money laundering for transactions worth an alleged €311 million.
The money was allegedly transferred to organisations in the British Virgin Islands before spring in 2016. Deutsche Bank have confirmed that their offices have been raided in relation to the Panama Papers, with an official statement reading: “We are cooperating fully with the authorities.”
Prosecutors claim that “Deutsche Bank helped customers fund offshore organisations in tax havens by transferring illegally acquired money without alerting authorities to suspected money laundering.”
The news comes one month after Denmark’s largest bank, Danske Bank, found themselves in a money-laundering scandal, having reportedly laundered €200 billion.
HSBC have also been caught up in money-laundering investigations in the past, getting fined $1.9 billion for failing to prevent Mexican drug cartels from laundering hundreds of millions of dollars in cash.
While cryptocurrency has often been cited as a primary resource for money-laundering and criminal activity, it’s interesting to see that it is in fact the largest, and most trusted, institutions like banks that are actually the entities involved in the criminal underworld.
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