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German federal prosecutors descended on Deutsche Bank’s Frankfurt headquarters and Berlin offices on Wednesday morning, conducted the search as part of the investigation of alleged money laundering. The raid cast a shadow over what should have been an unblemished moment of victory as CEO Christian Sewing announced booming annual profits at Germany’s biggest lender.
The morning after the raid, Deutsche Bank announced its highest annual profit since 2007: $8.5 billion in net income by 2025, driven by strong investment banking income. CEO Christian Sewing also unveiled a more than $1 billion share-buyback program and announced confidence in the bank’s turnaround.
However, when news of the investigation broke, the German bank’s shares FALL 1.86% Wednesday and only slightly improved on Thursday even after the upbeat earnings report.
“We confirmed that the Frankfurt public prosecutor’s office was on the site of our offices on Wednesday. This relates to transactions that began in the period 2013-2018. This is based on an alleged late filing of a suspicious activity report,” said a spokesman for Deutsche Bank luck. “On this basis, the prosecutor assesses whether there is any potential money laundering. Of course, we fully cooperate with the public prosecutor’s office.”
Although Sewing was not CEO at the time the time in question, who managed Deutsche Bank in April 2018, he has been a member of the lender’s executive board since 2015.
Deutsche Bank is trying to overcome a long history of compliance failures and regulatory scandals. The German lender has been raided once before, in 2018, over alleged tax evasion and money laundering. Raid on Wednesday FOLLOWS several civil suits against the bank were filed last fall.
Since 2000, Deutsche Bank has paid more than $20 billion of fines and penalties related to 101 different regulatory violations, the watchdog organization Good Jobs First reported. The bank admitted wrongdoing in 13 of the 101 cases tracked by the group, with the remaining 88 cases settled without admitting guilt.
Deutsche Bank also faces pending litigation in Europe and the UK Last October, five former employees nabbed the London lender, which said an internal audit—conducted by Sewing (then head of audit)—wrongly implicated them in a complex derivatives scheme based in Italy. The trades are said to have hidden hundreds of millions in investor losses. The audit, they say, led to their wrongful prosecution and convictions for false accounting and market manipulation—convictions that were overturned in 2022.
The Court of Appeal of Milan in Italy AGREES that Sewing’s audit “undoubtedly influenced” the charges.
Deutsche Bank previously denied wrongdoing in a statement on luck. “As disclosed in our Annual Report, the bank is aware that five individuals have threatened to file claims in the UK in the context of this matter. Deutsche Bank considers all such claims to be completely without merit and will firmly defend itself against them,” said a spokesman for Deutsche Bank, stressing that Stitching has not been named in the latest legal filing in London.
David Zaring, a professor of business ethics and law at Wharton, said Wednesday’s attack made him wonder if Deutsche Bank can emerge from the bottom of its past. “They’re paying a lot of fines, and a lot of fines in particular money laundering, as well as broader compliance areas,” he said. luck“It’s fair to say they’ve had a compliance problem. And I’m guessing they’re hoping they’ve solved some of those problems.”
The latest allegations
Frankfurt prosecutors confirmed that they are investigating “unknown responsible parties and employees” of suspected money laundering connected to transactions between 2013 and 2018.
Specifically, prosecutors are looking into whether Deutsche Bank failed to file suspicious activity reports in a timely manner—a violation that German regulators treat more severely. In February 2025, BaFin (Germany’s financial watchdog) hit Deutsche Bank with a $27.5 million fire related to three separate regulatory violations. Then, in November, this inflicted a record $52.5 million fine on JPMorgan for alleged “systematic failure” to submit timely money laundering reports.
Bloomberg reported that the investigation centers on Deutsche Bank’s business relationship with companies linked to Roman Abramovich, the Russian billionaire who made his fortune in metals and energy before gaining international prominence as the former owner of Chelsea Football Club. A legal representative for Abramovich denied any wrongdoing Bloombergand also denied that the searches were related to his activities, saying that his client “always acts in accordance with applicable domestic and international laws and regulations.”
A familiar refrain
The 2013-2018 timeframe is under current investigation by the Germans overlap exactly along with Deutsche Bank’s relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. That connection ultimately cost the bank more than $350 million in settlements and fines. In those same years, the bank opened more than 40 accounts for Epstein and his entities, processing millions of suspicious transactions despite regulators finding “significant compliance failures” and inadequate monitoring of account activity.
The case was also heard by the bank OBTAIN with the Estonian branch of Danske Bank, which processed $227 billion in suspicious transactions mostly originating from Russia and former Soviet states between 2007 and 2015. Deutsche Bank allegedly Rushed approximately $627 million in so-called “mirror trades” through Danske Bank in Lithuania—part of what has become Europe’s largest money-laundering scandal. That relationship contributed to $186 million in penalties imposed by the US Federal Reserve in 2023 for the bank’s failure to fix long-standing anti-money laundering deficiencies.
Separate from the scandal of Danske Bank, in 2017, the New York regulators fined the bank $425 million for running a “mirror trading” scheme that transferred $10 billion from Russia through its offices in Moscow, London, and New York. UK regulators added of their own punishment, with the Financial Conduct Authority documenting how more than $10 billion was transferred from Russia “in a manner highly suggestive of financial crime.”
Can Deutsche Bank continue?
Under Sewing’s leadership, the bank has made significant investments in strengthening controls, including strengthening anti-financial-crime processes through technology, training, and additional specialized staff, a Deutsche Bank spokeswoman said. luck last year. Regulatory investigations since 2020 have resulted in compliance reforms, and the bank has terminated several high-risk client relationships.
But the latest attack reminds the German lender how long the tail of compliance failures can stretch.
“Deutsche Bank was worse from 2013 to 2018. But it shows that they are back to where they were 10 years ago,” Zaring said. luck. “And I don’t think anyone wants that.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
