It hit news headlines and stirred mixed reactions when Police raided Deutsche Bank last November over claims of laundering money. Nearly 200 police officers, tax supervisors and prosecuting attorneys stormed half-a-dozen of Deutsche offices seizing both hand-written and electronic files.
The blow hit Deutsche Bank, which was at that time, struggling to pick up its pieces following 3 years of financial agony and regulatory issues.
Then in early December, Deutsche Bank AG DB 0.56% announced that it had agreed to pay €15 million ($16.6 million) in fines to close the investigation into the alleged tax evasion and money-laundering probe.
The announcement came after the Frankfurt prosecutors closed their investigation on the money laundering charges which we tied to two German clients. The detectives were investigating two anonymous Deutsche Bank employees believed to have assisted clients in creating offshore companies for money-laundering uses between 2013 and 2018, according to the prosecutor’s office in Frankfurt.
But the probe ended with DB clearing the fine which the prosecutor says reflects its failure to comply tom regulations by concealing or not flagging suspicious activity
The prosecutor’s office in Frankfurt also said it ended its probe into the two undisclosed staff linked to the crime without taking any action due to lack of evidence.
But Coinfomania.com, a Blockchain and crypto company feels this was one of the cases of hypocrisy.
“While DB claims that the probe was dropped due to the absence of adequate suspicion,” prosecutors enforced fines worth €5m for shortcomings in its control environment and also confiscated €10m of financial gains allegedly generated by the illegal transactions.”
“Evidently, the fact that employees of Deutsche were able to facilitate large scale money laundering while still offering its services to clients highlights an essential point that Bitcoin opposers often ignore.”
These wordings point toward the role of humans in laundering money through currencies like Bitcoin, and tend to point fingers at DB.
Final Words
But whether DB is being truthful about the lack of enough suspicion or not isn’t for this post to determine. And while critics may want to cite negligence, this case could have taken many other angles if only we had sufficient evidence to rely on.