by Pam Martens and Russ Martens at Wall Street on Parade
The Financial Times is reporting this morning that “Germany’s federal police office, criminal prosecutors and the country’s financial watchdog BaFin are raiding Deutsche Bank’s headquarters in Frankfurt” this morning, according to a statement from prosecutors.
The raid comes just four days after the body of Valentin (Val) Broeksmit, 46, was discovered at about 7 a.m. Monday at Woodrow Wilson High School in El Sereno, just outside of Los Angeles. Val Broeksmit was the son of William Broeksmit who was found hanged in his London home on January 26, 2014. The senior Boreksmit was a senior executive at Deutsche Bank involved in assessing risk on the bank’s balance sheet. (See our report: Documents Emerge in Senate Hearing from William Broeksmit, Deutsche Exec Alleged to Have Hanged Himself in January.)
According to a profile of Val Broeksmit written by David Enrich in the New York Times on October 1, 2019, the younger Broeksmit had obtained “a cache of confidential bank documents” left by his father that provided a “tantalizing” look into the internal workings of Deutsche Bank. Val Broeksmit was sharing the documents with the FBI.
Enrich explains what was going on around Deutsche Bank at that time:
“Federal and state authorities were swarming around Deutsche Bank. Some of the scrutiny centered on the lender’s two-decade relationship with President Trump and his family. Other areas of focus grew out of Deutsche Bank’s long history of criminal misconduct: manipulating markets, evading taxes, bribing foreign officials, violating international sanctions, defrauding customers, laundering money for Russian billionaires.”
Russian billionaires are now back in the news and Donald Trump is being fined $10,000 per day for failure to turn over documents to the New York State Attorney General’s office…
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