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Saturday, December 1, 2018
On Friday, investigators continued the previous day’s search of the headquarters of Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt, Germany, for evidence of money laundering and other wrongdoing in connection to the Panama Papers. The roughly 170 searchers, including police, prosecutors and tax experts, encountered such a volume of material that the matter could not be concluded in one day.
The allegations are that, from 2013 onward, two employees of Deutche Bank helped clients set up offshore accounts to avoid taxes and other regulations. Bank officials announced Thursday that they were cooperating with authorities but made no further comment.
The stock value of Deutsche Bank has dropped roughly in half over the course of 2018. Last year, the governments of the United States and United Kingdom fined Deutsche Bank USD$630 million for laundering money from Russia through its Moscow and London offices. This fall, BaFIN, a German regulator, sent a special representative to order Detusche Bank to improve its anti-money-laundering practices.
“Panama Papers” is an umbrella term for roughly 10 million documents that Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca sent to the press in the spring of 2016. The documents showed that 14 banks had helped wealthy clients hide billions of dollars of wealth to avoid taxes and other regulations. Deutsche Bank is said to have controlled roughly a third of the 1200 shell companies that were used to accomplish this. There were protests worldwide, several criminal prosecutions, and the leaders of the governments of Iceland and Pakistan both resigned.
“Almost three years on, and law enforcement are still relying on the Panama Papers for their work. It shows how investigative journalism has been at the forefront of opening the door on a morass of morally dubious—and sometimes illegal—activity by banks,” said Ava Lee of the anti-corruption organization Global Witness.
Daphne Caruana Galizia, the journalist who led the investigation of the Panama Papers, was killed in a car bombing last year.