Saturday, May 25, 2019

I have a question or two about Deutsche Bank

Donald Trump's lawyers have been fighting to stave off a House subpoena for financial records from Deutsche Bank and Capital One. That battle has reached a conclusion, of sorts...
Lawyers for President Donald Trump have reached an agreement with the House Intelligence and Financial Services committees to hold off for now on enforcing the subpoenas for Trump's financial records from Deutsche Bank and Capital One, according to a court document and a source familiar with the agreement.

Similar to a deal reached earlier this week with the House Oversight committee, the agreement allows for an expedited appeal schedule.
Basically, the subpoenas are blocked until the appeals court offers a ruling. I have a bad feeling about this.

Let's presume that the subpoenas go through. How do we know that Deutsche Bank will comply fully? What stops them from offering an incomplete and misleading accounting of Donald Trump's dealings with that bank?

Y'see, Deutsche Bank is in trouble -- serious trouble. They've been making lots of cutbacks. They need to raise a whole bunch of emergency capital....

...the kind of capital that Putin and the 'garchs can provide. So it seems likely that DB will do whatever is necessary to make Putin happy.

Here's a reminder of how closely the stories of DB, Russia and Trump are woven together.
According to Trump’s 2015 Federal Election Commission disclosure form, one major bank that did continue to lend money to the Trump Organization—in the hundreds of millions of dollars—was Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest. It was the lead lender on one of the few new real-estate developments that Trump did manage to build after his debt experience of the ’90s: the 92-story Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago, which opened in 2008. But Deutsche Bank Trust Co. Americas later sued Trump for nonpayment of loans on the project (Trump countersued, and the matter was settled). And here too Russian money may have been involved, though it may not have gone directly to Trump: Federal investigators are looking into whether Deutsche Bank sold some of Trump’s mortgage or other loans to Vnesheconombank, the Russian state development bank, or other Russian banks, Reuters reported in late 2017. Since the 2000s, Deutsche Bank has worked closely with Russian state institutions, and in 2015 the bank’s Russian arm was implicated in a $10 billion Russian money-laundering scheme; Deutsche Bank later signed a consent order and agreed to pay $630 million in fines.

Democratic Party lawmakers who are set to take over the House Select Committee on Intelligence in January are expected to investigate the relationship between Trump and Deutsche Bank, and between the bank and Russia. “There have long been credible allegations as to the use of Trump properties to launder money by Russian oligarchs, criminals, and regime cronies,” the lawmakers said in a letter to the Department of Justice on March 13.
Those two paragraphs establish the absurdity of the "no collusion" claim. And then there was the "mirror trading" scandal...
It worked like this: between 2011 and 2015, related corporate entities in Moscow and London bought and sold identical quantities of the same stock, through Deutsche Bank’s Moscow equities desk. By this alchemy, rubles in Russia were transformed into dollars in London. The process bypassed tax officials, currency regulators, and anti-money-laundering controls.
Why did DB continue to loan money to Trump even though most financial institutions have learned to treat the guy warily, and even though Trump tried to sue DB for three billion bucks back in 2008? (The basis of that suit was the bullshittiest bullshit in the history of quasi-legalistic bullshit.)

Most people think that Uncle Vladimir is acting as Trump's guarantor. His co-signer, as it were. Nothing else explains why DB treats Trump so well.

There's another important Deutsche Bank story that you might not know about. A few days ago, an investigative piece in the NYT revealed that DB has been using "faulty" software designed to sound the alarm whenever a transaction looked shady. Is Trump involved? But of course!
This week The New York Times reported that anti-money-laundering specialists at the bank recommended in 2016 and 2017 that multiple transactions involving legal entities controlled by Donald J. Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, be reported to a federal financial-crime watchdog.

But Deutsche Bank, which has lent billions of dollars to the entities controlled by Mr. Trump and Mr. Kushner, never filed such reports.

In November, prosecutors, federal agents, police officers and tax authorities searched Deutsche Bank headquarters in Frankfurt as part of an investigation into whether bank employees had helped customers use offshore tax havens to transfer money obtained illegally.
So again I ask: If the appeals court forces DB to comply with the House subpoenas, can we expect honesty from this bank?

Maybe I'm missing something, but Trump doesn't seem very worried about the DB angle. I think something is up. I think he thinks that he is protected on this front.

3 comments:

Alessandro Machi said...

Have you looked into Danske Bank? They were featured on 60 Minutes just a week or two ago.

gadfly said...

My conspiratorial mind is unaffected by this move which simply recognizes that the judge has accepted the Trump right of appeal which will chew up more time before the final granting of these documents for use by the House. In the meantime, Deutsche has turned over the docs and now the House has to say it won't peak until after the appeal is resolved.

Whether or not Deutsche remains functional as a business does not affect the ruling.

Joseph Cannon said...

You miss my point, gadfly. What stops DB from lying, from producing doctored records or a partial record? They answer to no-one. And they are clearly a bad actor.