German authorities raided Deutsche Bank’s headquarters in Frankfurt and a separate office in Berlin as part of a money-laundering investigation linked to Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich.

The exact nature of the probe remains unclear, but Frankfurt prosecutors are looking into “unknown” employees and three companies involved in transactions that were processed between 2013 and 2018, according to Bloomberg, which did not provide additional details about the counterparties or sizes of the transactions. 

Deutsche Bank “has maintained business relationships in the past with foreign companies which, in turn, are suspected of having been used for money laundering purposes,” the Frankfurt prosecutor’s office said in the report. 

Investigators are also looking into whether the bank moved too slowly to file one or more suspicious activity reports related to the matter, according to reporting by the Financial Times. 

For Deutsche Bank, the raids recall a similarly high-profile search in 2018, when approximately 170 police officers seized documents from Deutsche Bank’s headquarters as part of a probe into whether the bank had failed to flag suspicious payments processed through its operations in the British Virgin Islands (BVI), the FT said. 

Like the current investigation, the 2018 probe also focused on transactions made between 2013 and 2018, the newspaper said. The earlier probe was dropped after investigators failed to turn up sufficient evidence that Deutsche Bank employees had violated criminal laws, but the bank was forced to pay €15 million to settle the matter, the FT reported.

Abramovich, an oligarch known for his close relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, has been the subject of EU sanctions since March 2022. 

Read more at Bloomberg

Read more at the Financial Times