German prosecutors raided several Deutsche Bank offices in the Frankfurt area on Thursday over suspicions of money laundering based on revelations from the 2016 “Panama Papers” data leak.
Prosecutors said they were investigating allegations that Germany’s biggest lender helped clients set up offshore companies in tax havens to “transfer money from criminal activities” to Deutsche Bank accounts.
The latest raid was a new blow to the financial institution that has been hammered by a string of scandals linked to its pre-2008 crisis attempts to compete with Wall Street investment banking giants. Some 170 police officers and investigators from the Frankfurt prosecutor’s office were searching six of the bank’s premises in and around the city, the prosecutors said in a statement.
Deutsche Bank said it was “fully cooperating” with the authorities on the case which it said was “related to the Panama Papers”. The Panama Papers scandal that erupted in 2016 with a massive data leak from Panamaian legal firm Mossack Fonseca exposed large-scale tax evasion, laying bare how the world’s wealthy and powerful stashed their assets in offshore businesses.
