The headquarters of Germany's largest bank, Deutsche Bank, was raided today by scores of German police in connection with a massive international money laundering scheme.
One hundred seventy officers searched the headquarters of Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt and five other sites in the area early Thursday as part of a money-laundering investigation involving hundreds of millions of euros, prosecutors in Frankfurt said.
Two employees, who were not publicly identified but whose ages were given as 50 and 46, and other “unidentified people in positions of authority” are suspected of failing to report possible money laundering for transactions worth 311 million euros, or more than $350 million.
The money flowed to organizations in the British Virgin Islands before spring 2016, prosecutors said in an emailed statement.
The German bank confirmed in a statement that the police were investigating several of its offices in Germany and said the investigation related to the Panama Papers, a trove of files that put a spotlight on global money laundering. “We are cooperating fully with the authorities,” Deutsche said in the statement.
In April 2016, news organizations in cooperation with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists released the Panama Papers, which revealed how some of the world’s wealthiest individuals, including more than 900 customers of Deutsche Bank, dodged taxes in their home countries by transferring money to offshore accounts.
Prosecutors said the documents indicated “that Deutsche Bank helped customers found offshore organizations in tax havens by transferring illegally acquired money without alerting authorities to suspected money laundering.”
Paper and electronic documents were gathered during Thursday’s raid, they said.
The prosecutor’s office said two bank employees were suspected of helping Deutsche Bank clients set up offshore accounts and the bank had failed to report the suspected money laundering.
A lot of people are going to jail over this one, but my guess is that the client list of laundered cash may involve one or more members of the Trump Organization. Remember, Donald Trump and his kids have a long-standing relationship with the bank including a $285 million loan for Jared Kushner that happened just before Election Day 2016 and Trump still owes them $175 million or so.
You'd better believe that this raid and Mueller shifting to the endgame are related. Mueller has documents from the bank and that trail leads to the Russian mob. And if you think Trump is having a bad day...it just got infinitely worse for him.
Special counsel Robert Mueller has reached a tentative deal with Michael Cohen, the former personal attorney and long-time fixer for President Donald Trump, sources told ABC News.
Cohen is scheduled to appear in federal court in Manhattan on Thursday where he is expected to enter a guilty plea for misstatements to Congress in closed-door testimony last year about his contacts with Russians during the presidential campaign.
Once among the president’s most loyal and zealous defenders in business and politics, Cohen has now promised to “put family and country first” by cooperating with prosecutors, becoming perhaps the most pivotal public witness against his former boss.
Cohen’s earlier plea deal with federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York implicated President Trump in campaign finance felonies. Since then, Cohen has spent more than 70 hours in interviews with Mueller's team. The questioning has focused on contacts with Russians by Trump associates during the campaign, Trump’s business ties to Russia, obstruction of justice and talk of possible pardons, sources familiar with the discussions have told ABC News.
“The potential significance of Cohen’s cooperation is immense,” said Kendall Coffey, a former United States Attorney in Florida.
Cohen now giving testimony to Mueller on Trump's failed Moscow Trump Tower scheme and this bank raid on Trump's largest loan partner for money laundering are, as they say, a hell of a coincidence.
Things are moving very quickly now on the Mueller front as Trump jets to Argentina for the G20 summit and of course a meeting with his boss, Putin. Stay tuned.
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