Another day and another bank gets get raided for money laundering. Today it’s the Deutsche Bank, one of Germany’s oldest institutions, and one of the largest banks to continually commit crimes for profit and keep on profiting.
WW2 Reparations
The German bank, that once financed the Gestapo, has lost $21 billion in shareholder value over the last 5 years.
Back in 1999 though, Deutsche Bank was looking to purchase a competitor in the United States, when the financing of Auschwitz and helping Nazi’s sell stolen gold during WW2 became an issue for them. Like the kind hearted German bankers they are, they paid a fine and moved onto business as usual.
Selling CDO’s
In 2004, while the bank hired security to spy on shareholders and management, they started creating and selling CDO’s.
To sell investors on extremely high risk mortgages, that they could bundle with less risky mortgages and sell as good investment opportunities.
They finally agreed to a settlement of $7.2 billion in 2017 after spending 12 billion euros on litigation since 2012 about the mortgage fraud they committed.
Counter-Suing Trump
Loaning Donald Trump $640 million to build the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago was no problem for the bank until the financial crisis (that the Deutsche Bank helped create) hit Trump’s finances a little too hard. Trump actually refused to pay the last $40m of the loan and THEN he sued the bank claiming they helped create the financial crisis.
As The Guardian reported last year:
“Trump claimed Deutsche Bank had actually helped cause the crunch. Therefore it owed him. Trump demanded $3bn from Deutsche in compensation.”
If you can’t trust your banker or future politicians, who can you trust these days? If only there was a technology that verified, without need for trust like bitcoin, available back then.
With the lawsuit settled years ago, Trump was still kind enough to owe the bankers $360 million for more recent loans they provided his gang of business partners. Rosemary Vrablic of Deutsche Bank even attended the inauguration of the newly elected President Trump, possibly to remind him that he needs to repay the full loan he owes their bank.
Libor Scandal
Also during 2005 – 2010 Deutsche Bank’s newest scam was to collude with other banks and rig the benchmark interest rate, known as the Libor scandal. Because they could manipulate the interest rates, any person, company or bank that traded within the markets they manipulated lost money while they profited.
The Libor fraud forced the bank to pay $2.5 Billion in fines, along with $258 mil in penalties for the sanctions violations they were also caught for in 2015.
Current Money Laundering Scandal
Last year they paid $630 million in penalties for helping Russians launder $10 billion into offshore accounts between 2001 and 2015.
With 170 officers raiding 5 of it’s banks for laundering money connected to the Panama Papers, the bank could actually face punishment for all of the crimes it, or walk away as usual.
Responsible stock holders could sell their shares and buy bitcoin in Germany, to start realizing the value of decentralized currencies that people in Venezuela, China and India are now.
With the Pound and Euro expecting to fight on the world financial markets more next year, even gold could be a better store of value than whichever currency “wins” their fight for stability.
Or keep paying fees to a bank that helped liquidate Holocaust victims assets, told customers to buy worthless mortgages, colluded with banks to manipulate interest rates and laundered money possibly connected to Trump’s election campaign.
