dpa | On suspicion of money laundering, the judiciary is searching the headquarters of Germany’s largest financial institution in Frankfurt am Main as well as one of the bank’s locations in Berlin – on the very day before the DAX group’s balance sheet is presented for 2025. Unknown responsible persons and employees are accused, the Frankfurt public prosecutor’s office announced.
The Frankfurt am Main public prosecutor’s office for white-collar criminal matters is conducting the investigation together with the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA). The background to this is the institute’s previous business relationships with foreign companies, which themselves are suspected of having carried out money laundering.
According to the investigators, additional evidence was to be secured during the searches. According to information from Mirrors, who had previously reported on itshortly after 10 a.m., around 30 plainclothes investigators entered the bank’s headquarters in downtown Frankfurt.
After the searches became known, Deutsche Bank’s share price temporarily fell by around 3 percent on the stock exchange. The DAX group’s figures presented this Thursday are not a good thing: analysts expect that the institute will have significantly increased its profit in 2025 to almost 6 billion euros. But now it has to happen CEO Christian Sewing to answer critical questions about the raid.
Bank confirms searches
According to information from the German Press Agency, the investigation concerns transactions in the intricate corporate conglomerate of the Russian oligarch Roman Abramowitsch from 2013 to 2018. A report by South German newspaper According to the report, the investigators accuse Deutsche Bank of late handing over one or more suspected money laundering reports about Abramowitsch’s companies to the authorities.
“No further information can be provided about the background of the business relationships, the transactions carried out via Deutsche Bank AG and their scope, or about the companies themselves,” explained a spokesman for the public prosecutor’s office.
A spokesman for Deutsche Bank confirmed the searches upon request, without providing further details: “We confirm that a measure by the Frankfurt public prosecutor’s office is currently being carried out at Deutsche Bank’s business premises,” said the spokesman. “The bank is cooperating fully with the public prosecutor’s office. We ask for your understanding that we will not comment beyond this.”
I’ve often had trouble with supervision
Accusations of not paying close enough attention to the issue of money laundering and filing suspicious activity reports too late have repeatedly caused problems for Deutsche Bank. At the end of April 2022, for example, investigators from the public prosecutor’s office, BKA and Bafin searched the bank’s headquarters in Frankfurt.
Bank employees are required by law to respond if they suspect that customers are laundering funds from criminal transactions or that transactions are related to them Terrorist financing to report this immediately. Such suspicious transaction reports often concern correspondent banking. There, Deutsche Bank uses its global reach to help other financial institutions process payment transactions.
The financial supervision Bafin temporarily sent a special representative to the bankwhich was supposed to monitor progress in the fight against money laundering and terrorist financing – a first in the German banking industry. The special representative was withdrawn at the end of 2024.