The raid on the events was only three months ago, and Deutsche Bank has now accepted a fine from the Frankfurt public prosecutor’s office. The background was transactions by Rifaat al-Assad, uncle of the Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad, in which Deutsche Bank was at least the on-lending bank (correspondent bank). A Paris appeals court sentenced Rifaat al-Assad to four years in prison in absentia last year. He is known as, among other things “Butcher of Hama”, since he bloodily crushed an uprising in Syria decades ago. The bank accepted the fine, and the process was now complete, the institute said, emphasizing that Rifaat had never been a customer.
Prosecutors said they found 701 cases of negligent failure to report money laundering. Banks are obliged to report suspicious payments to the authorities immediately, otherwise there is a risk of at least a fine. In recent years, Deutsche Bank has repeatedly paid penalties for late reports of suspected money laundering. Since 2018, a special representative from the financial supervisory authority Bafin has also been monitoring the institute’s controls in this area.
In the end, Deutsche Bank did the investigations into Rifaat al-Assad itself after reporting suspicious transactions in 2020. In the current case, however, Deutsche Bank only had the payments from another institute, a branch of the Danish one Jyske Bank in Gibraltar. The bank was therefore able to dispel the accusation of aiding and abetting money laundering, which formed the basis of the search of the Frankfurt headquarters at the end of April. The public prosecutor’s office has stopped the investigation against unknown suspects of aiding and abetting money laundering due to a lack of suspicion. However, the authority accuses the bank of having had to check the business relationship with the bank in Gibraltar “for money laundering relevance” as early as 2017. An audit by the Danish financial supervisory authority would have given rise to this. In addition, Deutsche Bank maintained accounts in Spain for members of the al-Khayer family who were close to the Assads.