Deutsche Bank

Deutsche Bank is under multiple investigations for money laundering, bank fraud, tax fraud, and insurance fraud.

2008 Trump Defaulted on a Deutsche Bank loan, so Jared Kushner recommended his private banker Rosemary Vrablic, whose boss was William Broeksmit.  Broeksmit wasUkraine-born and committed suicide by hanging in 2014, leading his son to discover documents, work with the FBI, and write the book Dark Towers (Harper Collins). Interview with Dark Towers  author David Enrich: Narativ Live with Zev Shalev: The Truth About Trump and Deutsche Bank Part 1    Part2

Russiagate DeathWatch

Late Deutsche Bank Exec’s Son Gave Trump, Russia Documents to FBI, Congress: Report Daily Beast Barbie Latza Nadeau October 01, 2019

VTB Bank-Russia’s State Bank, backed Trump’s Deutsche Bank loans

2012 Doral Resort in Miami- $100 million Deutsche Bank loan

2015 Washington, DC, Old Post Office Hotel conversion – $170 million

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R.”Cy” Vance

Trump’s Bank Was Subpoenaed by N.Y. Prosecutors in Criminal Inquiry The subpoena, sent to Deutsche Bank, suggests that the inquiry into President Trump’s business practices is more wide-ranging than previously known. The New York Times By David Enrich, Ben Protess, William K. Rashbaum and Benjamin Weiser  August 5, 2020  “On his 2012 balance sheet, Mr. Trump described an estate he owns in Westchester County, N.Y., as being worth $291 million. He bought the property, Seven Springs, in 1996 for $7.5 million…Also in 2012 — just as the economy was beginning to recover from the financial crisis — Mr. Trump valued his skyscraper at 40 Wall Street in Lower Manhattan at $527 million. An article in The Wall Street Journal that year reported that property had a value of about $400 million, based on sales of comparable properties. It would be three more years until the building achieved Mr. Trump’s valuation, according to Trepp, which tracks commercial real estate lending.”

President Trump Financial Disclosure to US Ethics Office for 2017 submitted May 15, 2018-valued property under $50 million

40 Wall Fortunes Rise Again Wall St. Journal by Laura Kusisto January 23, 2012 Valued 40 Wall St., NYC at $527 million vs. $400 million in this article, which also valued Trump golf resorts in Scotland and the US at $1.6 billion, but Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index valued them at $650 million in 2019.

Congress asks Deutsche Bank for Trump records  May 24, 2017

“Trump and his family have accounts there, and the bank’s “2011 Russian mirror scandal, which the bank has already agreed to pay $628 million in fines after regulators determined the bank helped to covertly move $10 billion out of Russia through a process known as “mirror trading”” prompted Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), Rep. Daniel Kildee (D-MI), Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI), Rep. Al Green (D-LA) and Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D-CO) to request “whether loans Deutsche Bank made to President Trump were guaranteed by the Russian Government, or were in any way connected to Russia,” the letter to the bank said. “Only with full disclosure can the American public determine the extent of the President’s financial ties to Russia and any impact such ties may have on his policy decisions,” the committee said in the letter.”  Yahoo News

DEUTSCHE BANK IS TURNING OVER INFORMATION ON TRUMP  Vanity Fair

Regulators are scrutinizing hundreds of millions in loans and a subpoena from Robert Mueller is expected.  July 20, 2017

“In addition to Donald, Ivanka Trump is also said to be a Deutsche Bank client, as is Jared Kushner and his mother, who, per the Times, have “an unsecured line of credit from Deutsche Bank, valued at up to $25 million.” In addition, the Kushner family business, Kushner Companies, got a $285 million loan from the bank last year (2016). And because the Kushners and Trumps have never shied away from conflicts of interest, in 2013, Kushner reportedly “ordered up a glowing profile of [Vrablic] in the real estate magazine he owned,” with a disclosure about their connection at the very end of the piece. The New York Times reports that banking regulators are currently “reviewing hundreds of millions of dollars in loans made to Mr. Trump’s businesses through Deutsche Bank’s private wealth management unit . . . to [see] if the loans might expose the bank to heightened risk.”Meanwhile, the Guardian reports that executives at Deutsche are “expecting that the bank will soon be receiving subpoenas or other requests for information from Robert Mueller,” and that the special counsel’s investigative team and the bank have “already established informal contact in connection to the federal investigation.”

There’s certainly plenty to look into. Over the last 20 years, Trump has received more than $4 billion in loan commitments and potential bond offerings from the German lender, despite suing the company in 2008 when he fell behind on payments on the $640 million loan he was given to build Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago. Incredibly, in order to avoid paying the $40 million he had personally guaranteed, Trump and his lawyer argued that “Deutsche Bank is one of the banks primarily responsible for the economic dysfunction we are currently facing”—i.e. the global financial crisis—and therefore it should pay him $3 billion in damages under the extraordinary event clause in his contract. Naturally, the bank countersued, calling the real-estate developer’s claim “classic Trump.” In the end, after threatening to take his name off the building if he wasn’t granted more time to pay, the bank gave Trump extra time; when he did pay the money he owed to the firm’s real-estate lending division, it was with another loan he got from Deutsche’s wealth-management unit. Trump subsequently moved his business from the real estate group to the private wealth management group, where, according to the Times, “executives were more willing to deal with him.” One of those executives was Rosemary Vrablic, who has helped finance three Trump properties over the last six years, lending $300 million in the process. That amount is “somewhat unusual by Wall Street standards,” former and current Deutsche Bank executives and wealth managers at other firms on Wall Street told the Times” Vanity Fair

Deutsche Bank Found `Systemic’ Failure in Russia Cash Flight  Bloomberg

By Keri Geiger  and Gregory Whiten Red flags started popping up inside Deutsche Bank AG in early 2014 about billions of dollars in suspect trades from Moscow. A Cypriot bank sent a query to London”

Trump May Have a $300 Million Conflict of Interest With Deutsche Bank  Bloomberg

By Keri Geiger, Greg Farrell, and Sarah Mulholland 
Read More on the Deutsche Bank page

Deutsche Bank’s Rosemary Vrablic and Private Banking’s Link to CRE Finance

Commercial Observer BY  FEBRUARY 6, 2013

“With a book of business north of $5.5 billion, Rosemary Vrablic, a managing director in the asset and wealth management division at Deutsche Bank, can help.
Private banking is loosely defined as personalized financial services offered by banks to their high-net-worth clients.

The firm places Deutsche Bank’s global assets under management in this area at $348.6 billion at the end of 2011—no small achievement for a German-based bank at the height of the European debt crisis and during a year that saw the United States riled by its own debt ceiling debacle.

“In 2008 and 2009, I saw real concern—even from our wealthiest clients. They were in the most defensive position I have seen in all of my career,” Ms. Vrablic told The Mortgage Observer one recent winter morning at the bank’s Park Avenue offices.”  Commercial Observer 

Observer Media is a Kushner company.

Deutsche Bank’s $10-Billion Scandal

How a scheme to help Russians secretly funnel money offshore unravelled.  The New Yorker

By 

“Mirror trades are not inherently illegal. The purpose of an equities desk at an investment bank is to help approved clients buy and sell stock, and there could be legitimate reasons for making a simultaneous trade. A client might want to benefit, say, from the difference between the local and the foreign price of a stock. Indeed, because the individual transactions involved in mirror trades did not directly contravene any regulations, some employees who worked at Deutsche Bank’s Russian headquarters at the time deny that such activity was improper. Viewed with detachment, however, repeated mirror trades suggest a sustained plot to shift and hide money of possibly dubious origin. Deutsche Bank’s actions are now under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice, the New York State Department of Financial Services, and financial regulators in the U.K. and in Germany. In an internal report, Deutsche Bank has admitted that, until April, 2015, when three members of its Russian equities desk were suspended for their role in the mirror trades, about ten billion dollars was spirited out of Russia through the scheme. The lingering question is whose money was moved, and why.

Before the housing market collapsed in the United States, in 2008, sparking a global financial crisis, Deutsche Bank created about thirty-two billion dollars’ worth of collateralized debt obligations, which helped to inflate the housing bubble. In 2010, Deutsche Bank’s own staff accused it of having masked twelve billion dollars’ worth of losses. Eric Ben-Artzi, a former risk analyst, was one of three whistle-blowers. He told the Securities and Exchange Commission that, had the bank’s true financial health been known in 2008, it might have folded, as Lehman Brothers had. Last year, Deutsche Bank paid the S.E.C. a fifty-five-million-dollar fine but admitted no wrongdoing. Ben-Artzi told me that bank executives had incurred a tiny penalty for a huge crime. “There was cultural criminality,” he said. “Deutsche Bank was structurally designed by management to allow corrupt individuals to commit fraud.”

Scandals have proliferated at Deutsche Bank. Since 2008, it has paid more than nine billion dollars in fines and settlements for such improprieties as conspiring to manipulate the price of gold and silver, defrauding mortgage companies, and violating U.S. sanctions by trading in Iran, Syria, Libya, Myanmar, and Sudan. Last year, Deutsche Bank was ordered to pay regulators in the U.S. and the U.K. two and a half billion dollars, and to dismiss seven employees, for its role in manipulating the London Interbank Offered Rate, or libor, which is the interest rate banks charge one another. The Financial Conduct Authority, in Britain, chastised Deutsche Bank not only for its manipulation of libor but also for its subsequent lack of candor. “Deutsche Bank’s failings were compounded by them repeatedly misleading us,” Georgina Philippou, of the F.C.A., declared. “The bank took far too long to produce vital documents and it moved far too slowly to fix relevant systems.”

In April, 2015, the mirror-trades scheme unravelled. After a two-month internal investigation, the three Deutsche Bank employees were suspended. One was Tim Wiswell, a thirty-seven-year-old American who was then the head of Russian equities at the bank. The others were Russian sales traders on the equities desk: Dina Maksutova and Georgiy Buznik. Afterward, Bloomberg News suggested that some of the money diverted through mirror trades belonged to Igor Putin, a cousin of the Russian President, and to Arkady and Boris Rotenberg. The Rotenberg brothers own Russia’s largest construction company, S.G.M., and are old friends of Vladimir Putin. They are on the U.S. government’s list of sanctioned Russians, which was compiled in response to Putin’s aggression in Ukraine. According to the U.S. Treasury, the Rotenbergs have “made billions of dollars in contracts” that were awarded to their company by the Russian state, often without a transparent bidding process. (Last year, S.G.M. was awarded a contract worth $5.8 billion to build a twelve-mile bridge between Russia and Crimea.)

In June, 2015, with pressure from shareholders intensifying over the mirror trades and other scandals, the co-C.E.O.s of Deutsche Bank, Anshu Jain and Jürgen Fitschen, announced that they would resign. They were replaced by John Cryan, whose remit was to clean up the bank. That September, he announced the impending close of all investment-banking activity in Russia.

Research published last year by Deutsche Bank’s own analysts suggested that unrecorded capital inflows from Russia into the U.K. correlated strongly with increases in U.K. house prices and, to a lesser extent, with a strengthening of the pound sterling. Capital flight also has weakened Russia’s tax base and its currency. In 2012, Putin began a “de-offshorization” program, urging businesses and oligarchs to keep their headquarters and their fortunes at home. Two years later, after Russia’s incursion into Crimea led to sanctions from the European Union and the U.S., Putin declared that offshorization was illegal. But as the ruble and the economy foundered many Russians felt even more eager to remove their money. Mirror trading was an ideal escape tunnel.

According to people with knowledge of how mirror trades worked at Deutsche Bank, the main clients who were engaged in the scheme came to the bank in 2011 through Sergey Suverov, a sales researcher. Suverov left the bank soon afterward. (He has not been charged with wrongdoing.) Igor Volkov, the Russian broker, became the clients’ primary representative.” The New Yorker

Deutsche Bank fined $630m over Russia money laundering claims  The Guardian

Authorities in US and UK issue fine after saying bank used offices in Moscow and London to move $10bn out of country

A statue is pictured next to the logo of Germany’s Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt
 Deutsche Bank has been fined after New York and UK authorities found pervasive weakness in its money laundering safeguards. Photograph: Kai Pfaffenbach/Reuters

Deutsche Bank has been fined more than $630m (£506m) for failing to prevent $10bn of Russian money laundering and exposing the UK financial system to the risk of financial crime.

A US regulator, the New York Department of Financial Services (DFS), also fined the bank $425m as it listed problems at Deutsche including one senior compliance officer stating he had to “beg, borrow, and steal” to get the resources to combat money laundering. As part of the settlement, the DFS has imposed a monitor, who will police the behaviour inside the bank for two years.” The Guardian