Deutsche Bank raided in 'Panama Papers' probe

Frankfurt - Allegations that lender helped clients set up offshore firms in tax havens to 'transfer money from criminal activities' probed

German prosecutors raided several Deutsche Bank offices in the Frankfurt area Thursday over suspicions of money laundering based on revelations from the 2016 "Panama Papers" data leak.
Frankfurt prosecutors said they were investigating allegations that Germany's biggest lender helped clients set up offshore companies in tax havens to "transfer money from criminal activities" to Deutsche Bank accounts.
The latest raid was a new blow to the financial institution that has been hammered by a string of scandals linked to its pre-2008 crisis attempts to compete with Wall Street investment banking giants.
Some 170 police officers and investigators from the Frankfurt prosecutor's office were searching six of the bank's premises in and around the city, the prosecutors said in a statement.
Deutsche Bank said it was "fully cooperating" with the authorities on the case which it said was "related to the Panama Papers".
The Panama Papers scandal that erupted in 2016 with a massive data leak from Panamaian legal firm Mossack Fonsenca exposed large-scale tax avoidance, laying bare how the world's wealthy and powerful stashed their assets in offshore businesses.
Deutsche Bank was among hundreds of financial institutions whose names cropped up in the media reports.
Frankfurt prosecutors said their probe was focusing on two Deutsche Bank employees aged 50 and 46, as well as "several" unnamed senior staff members.
Based on information from the Panama Papers, they are accused of "failing to report suspicions of money laundering" linked to offshore firms involved in tax evasion "even though there was sufficient evidence" to suggest illegal activity, prosecutors said.
Shares in Deutsche Bank fell 2.7 per cent to 8.36 euros by 1000GMT, against a DAX blue-chip index up 0.6 per cent.
The raids are the latest embarrassment for embattled Deutsche Bank, which has repeatedly been rapped by regulators for lax money laundering controls.
In September, Germany's financial supervisor BaFin took the unusual step of embedding auditors from KPMG at Deutsche to monitor the bank's progress in battling illegal transactions such as money laundering, terrorist financing and dealings with organised crime.
In 2017, Deutsche already had to pay a fine of almost $630 million after an investigation by British and American authorities into laundering of money originating in Russia.
Soon afterwards, the US Federal Reserve ordered a further fine of $41 million over gaps in the bank's money laundering surveillance.
Deutsche Bank has also come under scrutiny over its activities as a correspondent for scandal-plagued Danske Bank, Denmark's largest lender.
Citing people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg News had reported that Deutsche was the unnamed bank a Danske whistleblower said had handled almost $150 billion of suspect transactions originating in the Danish firm's Estonian branch.
Deutsche Bank is in the throes of a major restructuring plan, with 7,000 jobs to go by the end of 2019.
The bank had said at the end of October that it expects to report a net profit for the first time since 2014, not least because no legal settlements in the hundreds of millions or even billions were on the horizon as in previous years.