Deutsche Investigated For Five-Year Delay In Reporting Suspicious Transfers

Despite breaking off its relationship with Danske Bank in 2015, Deutsche Bank didn’t report more than a million suspect bank transfers until February of this year.

The transfers weren’t reported until five years after they were flagged as suspicious by a whistleblower, Reuters reported, citing an unidentified person familiar with the matter.

Investigators in Germany are now trying to figure out whether the transactions were covered up for a reason, and who’s responsible for doing so.

The new revelations add to the banks troubles, as it tries to gain back the confidence of regulators and customers alike. The bank has recently said that it’s made its money laundering controls more stringent.

Danske Bank was no longer allowed to operate in Estonia after it admitted that $220 billion of questionable money went through a branch there between the years of 2007 and 2015. Deutsche is involved because it was the one that processed most of the transactions, which led to a raid by German officials last month.

Deutsche Bank said that it would help with the investigation, and that it “remains committed to providing appropriate information to all authorized investigations.”

“We have considerably increased staff numbers in Anti-Financial Crime and more than tripled our staff since 2015. We invested since 2016 700 million euros in upgrading our key control functions there,” a bank spokesperson said.

Investigators are now trying to get a sense of the transactions and going through a small fraction of them from 2014 and 2015 involving other Soviet states.

Deutsche was once the flagship bank of Germany on Wall Street, but the scandal and a number of penalties, including a fine of $7.2 billion for selling bad U.S. mortgages before the crash, have changed its tenor. 

The bank is now facing a series of investigations, even as it tries to regain its former stature. It’s unclear why the suspicious transfers weren’t reported until earlier this year.