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Secret documents from the US Department of the Treasury reveal glaring weaknesses in the global fight against money laundering. Big banks are often negligent and the authorities are overwhelmed. Deutsche Bank is one of the institutes that need a special explanation as a result of the documents. A group of the Russian mafia and an aide to international terrorist groups are said to have laundered huge amounts of millions through them and other banks. This is evident in the US Department documents posted to the online medium. Buzzfeed News leaked. Money launderers have not only used the global infrastructure of Germany’s largest bank for a longer period of time and to a greater extent than previously assumed, the bank’s security systems have obviously also failed.
According to an investigation by SZ, NDR and WDR, current Deutsche Bank CEO Christian Sewing is partly responsible for the fact that there was no earlier warning of how money launderers could use the bank for suspicious stock transactions. Before being appointed to the Board of Directors, Sewing was Head of Corporate Audit. In 2014, his department examined the processes in the remarkable stock trading in Russia and in the end gave the green light: everything was fine.
The experts, who were commissioned by Deutsche Bank itself, later attested the Sewing department’s examination of serious shortcomings, the work was “inadequate.” The public did not know. Deutsche Bank denies the direct or indirect involvement of the current CEO in the review of the Moscow business. He only presented the general plan for several hundred tests, the so-called audits, for 2014. He read the report for the first time “when it became clear in May 2015 that there could have been deficiencies in this audit.” Sewing personally declined to comment.
In addition to Deutsche Bank, many other major banks are also the focus of international research. It shows how known houses were involved in money laundering and how criminal networks sometimes operated undisturbed. The investigation is based on secret documents from the US Department of the Treasury. Buzzfeed News has arrived. These include more than 2,100 reports from 2000 to 2017 in which banks reported suspicious transactions totaling more than two trillion dollars to the US financial crime enforcement network (FinCEN). FinCEN declined to comment in detail on the investigation and referred to the confidentiality of the documents.
Some banks took several years to report suspicious transfers
These show that major international banks such as HSBC, Standard Chartered and JPMorgan transferred a total of hundreds of billions of dollars a year, although they suspected that the transferred money was attributable to despots, corrupt oligarchs, drug traffickers or other problematic actors. Buzzfeed News shared the documents with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which allowed the global investigation of 110 outlets from 88 countries. In Germany, SZ, NDR and WDR evaluated together with the German branch of Buzzfeed News the documents, the results are published worldwide under the term FinCEN-Files.
The files also offer new insights into the secret deals of former Donald Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and other political figures. Above all, however, the documents show how banks and authorities often failed in the fight against money launderers, for example because they were too slow.
The United Nations estimates that up to $ 5.5 billion of dirty shops are laundered every day. Money that comes from the arms trade, illegal prostitution, or cases of fraud, for example, is funneled into the regular business cycle in this way. This allows criminals to spend it later without realizing where the money originally came from. According to experts, this is also possible because internal banking controls are not rigorous enough. The business model of a large global bank is now “inconceivable without contact with criminal networks,” says financial expert and former Green Party member Gerhard Schick: “The industry seems to have become a particularly important helper of organized crime throughout the world. world”. Bank representatives point out, however, that they can only give indications of suspicious transfers, this is already an enormous effort, investigations and charges are the responsibility of the authorities.
Under US law, banks must report suspicious transfers to FinCEN within 30 days. In one case, the US branch of Deutsche Bank took 5,678 days and the US BNY Mellon even 6,666 days, more than 18 years. Both financial institutions declined to comment on the specific cases.
Commerzbank also appears several times in the documents, among other things, reported suspicious transactions in connection with the Russian Sviaz-Bank. According to FinCEN-Files, Commerzbank suspected a connection to the US and European sanctions against the regime in Syria, but reported the suspicion according to documents only ten months later. Commerzbank declined to comment on customer relations with reference to bank secrecy.
