By Youri Kemp
Caribbean News Now associate editor
[email protected]
FRANKFURT, Germany — Deutsche Bank’s offices, including its headquarters in Frankfurt, were searched by German authorities last week in a money laundering probe, prosecutors said in a statement. The raid was reportedly prompted by the now infamous “Panama Papers”, a dump of millions of financial documents from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca & Co.
The public prosecutor’s office in Frankfurt am Main said that about 170 officials were involved in searches at the bank’s premises just to pin down two Deutsche Bank officials of interest.
The Panama Papers revealed several bank accounts in Panama connected to senior politicians in Europe, in addition to large investors in the US, and their involvement in money laundering and tax evasion schemes through various offshore accounts.
The documents revealed the existence of 214,488 secret offshore entities, based on financial spreadsheets, copies of passports, emails and corporate records from 1977 to 2015.
The leak to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) prompted the prime minister of Iceland to tender his resignation and forced then British prime minister, David Cameron, to acknowledge that he financially benefited from shares in an offshore account set up by his father.
The sheer number of the accounts and details involving their nature has been catalogued by ICIJ in an online database.
Deutsche Bank confirmed that the raid had taken place and stressed that the bank was cooperating with authorities.
“We have already provided the authorities with all the relevant information regarding Panama Papers,” the bank said in a statement. “Of course, we will cooperate closely with the public prosecutor’s office in Frankfurt, as it is in our interest as well to clarify the facts.”
Deutsche Bank has been hit with massive fines since 2008, to the tune of some US$18 billion, the largest penalties paid by any bank in Europe outside of the Royal Bank of Scotland.
As of March 2015, the law firm at the centre of the data leak, Mossack Fonseca, said it was set to close down. However, recent indications suggest that it has not been officially wound down yet or entered into significant stages in its winding up process.
Mossack Fonseca also had a representative office in The Bahamas and a number of other Caribbean financial centres.
It is not known whether or not other Deutsche Bank offices outside Germany and Western Europe, including its office in the Cayman Islands, have been affected by the probe or are cooperating with German officials.
