While not connected to Donald Trump or the Trump Organization, news that German authorities raided Deutsche Bank headquarters as part of a money laundering investigation tied to the Panama Papers case caught the attention of anyone familiar with Trump's history with the financial institution.
"Police officers and tax inspectors entered Deutsche Bank's headquarters in Frankfurt early Thursday morning and seized documents," NPR's Esme Nicholson reports from Berlin. "Prosecutors are investigating two employees of the bank who allegedly assisted customers in setting up offshore firms to avoid anti-money laundering safeguards when transferring money to accounts at Deutsche Bank."
Nicholson adds, "According to investigators, in 2016 alone, more than 900 Deutsche Bank customers were served by a subsidiary registered in the British Virgin Islands."
Those 900 customers did business totaling 311 million euros (about $350 million), the Frankfurt prosecutor's office said.
The search involved some 170 officers from the prosecutor's office, the tax investigation department and the federal police, said senior public prosecutor Nadja Niesen, in an email to NPR. She added that the search resulted in the seizure of "numerous business documents" in either electronic or paper form. There have been no arrests, Niesen said.
Deutsche Bank suspiciously was willing to lend money to Trump when no one else would and continued to do business with him even after he defaulted on a huge loan.
Trump and the bank once sued each other after he failed to repay a $300 million loan. And the author and reporter Luke Harding has described a "shuffle of money" between the bank's dealings with figures in Russia and its business with Trump.
In an interview with NPR's Fresh Air one year ago, Harding said, "While money from Deutsche Bank New York is going into the Trump Organization, Deutsche Bank in Moscow is at the center of a massive Russian money laundering operation involving about $10 billion" that allowed Russia's elites to take rubles out of Russia and convert them into dollars in the U.S.
Authorities in both the U.S. and U.K. have imposed heavy fines on Deutsche Bank for its practices involving Russian accounts, Harding said.
Deutsche Bank Offices Are Raided In Money Laundering Probe (NPR)