German investigators have raided the offices of Deutsche Bank, the country’s largest lender, as part of an investigation into suspected money laundering. Searches were conducted on Wednesday at the bank’s headquarters in Frankfurt and in Berlin.
Prosecutors in Frankfurt stated the probe targets “unknown employees” and prior business relationships with foreign entities, believed to have been used for illicit financial transactions. The prosecutor’s office could not provide further details on the nature or scale of the transactions under scrutiny.
Deutsche Bank confirmed the presence of the Frankfurt public prosecutor’s office, issuing a statement that read: “We confirm that the Frankfurt public prosecutor’s office is on site in our offices. The bank is cooperating fully with the public prosecutor‘s office. We cannot comment further.” This raid occurs just a day before the financial institution is scheduled to release its 2025 earnings report.
Deutsche Bank has a history of regulatory issues. It was fined $205 million by New York regulators in 2018 for manipulating the foreign exchange market, and $41 million by the Federal Reserve in 2017 for failure to maintain controls against money laundering, as well as $629 million in penalties in 2017 by New York and British regulators for lapses in controls that allowed wealthy Russians to launder $10 billion in illicit funds through the bank.
In general, money laundering can be defined as transactions intended to obscure the origin of funds to make them appear to have come from a legitimate source.