What's wrong with me? I never drank the orange koolaid.
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Deutsche Bank stepped in and helped Trump, at a time when its Moscow office had become a focal point for moving capital from Russia to the West. Earlier this year, the bank paid $630 million to settle charges of laundering $10 billion for Russians.
Deutsche Bank is synonymous with Russian money laundering,” Luke Harding, author of Collusion, a book on the Trump-Russia connections, said in an interview with Newsweek Tuesday.
About ten hours after the first reports of the subpoena appeared in European newspapers, Trump lawyers denied that the bank had been subpoenaed. But Deutsche Bank did not deny the reports. In a statement, the bank said: “DB takes its legal obligations seriously and remains committed to cooperating with authorized investigations into this matter.”
Via @JaySekulow lawyer for @realDonaldTrump “We have confirmed that the news reports that the Special Counsel had subpoenaed financial records relating to the President are false. No subpoena has been issued or received. We have confirmed this with the bank and other sources.”
[ Read that carefully. Notice the "relating to the President" words. Sekulow didn't deny the bank had been subpoenaed, just that Donald J Trump named accounts haven't been. ]
The bank’s $300 million loan to Trump, after the oft-bankrupt magnate fell behind on a separate loan from the German bank, was highly unusual according to banking experts, and likely raises questions for Mueller’s investigators about who or what was backing the additional funds.
In 2008, according to Harding’s book, Trump was refusing to pay off a $640 million loan, which he was using for a project in Chicago. He blamed the financial crash for his failure to pay. When Deutsche Bank tried to collect, Trump went on the offensive, and sued the bank in Queens, New York, demanding $3 billion for its role in the crash.
[ Did you all stop paying loans during the financial crisis? Why not? Donald did. See, he's better than you saps. He refuses to pay loans and gets banks to loan him more. Try that. See how it works. ]
Two years later, all was forgiven and the bank was loaning him $300 million, due in 2023 and 2024. It was not the first time lenders had doubled down on bad loans to Trump, but American banks never revisited that strategy after Trump’s $900 million bankruptcy in the 1990s.
The Deutsche Bank deal shocked Harding’s sources. “Asked whether it was normal to give more money to a customer who was a bad credit risk and a litigant,” Harding wrote, “one former senior Deutsche Bank staff member said: “Are you fucking kidding me?”
The bank also loaned Trump the money during a period in which the Moscow office of Deutsche Bank was headed by the 20-something son of a KGB agent, and an equally green young American named Tim Wiswell, who, according to Harding, is currently “on the lam” and is the “Edward Snowden of banking.”
Under the two men, the Moscow office of Deutsche Bank moved billions of rubles out of Russia, a volume of business that astounded fellow bankers. The office was also doing billions of dollars of business with the big Russian bank VTB. [ VTB owned by the Russian government. ]
“They were doing some very curious things. Nobody could make sense of their business,” Chris Barter, the CEO of Goldman Sachs Moscow at the time, told Harding. “We found the nature and concentration of their business with VTB quite galling. Nobody else could touch VTB.”
Earlier this year, Deutsche Bank paid $670 million in U.S. and U.K. fines for irregularities related to $10 billion in Russian money laundering. The bank also closed its Moscow investment office.
Harding says the subpoena suggests that “money laundering is at the heart of the [Mueller] investigation.” He pointed to the charges against Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman and the subject of Mueller’s first indictment, who is out on bail, accused of laundering money for Ukrainian and Russian clients.
Despite months of journalist and congressional committee interest in Trump loans and despite reports that Trump-branded building units around the world are connected with Russian money-laundering, Deutsche Bank has “stonewalled” requests for information—until the Mueller subpoena, Harding said.
The subpoena reportedly asks for information about Trump and his family members’ loans. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner got a $287 million Deutsche Bank loan shortly before the 2016 election.
The former chief financial officer of the U.S.-Russia Investment Fund, who is familiar with U.S. and international money laundering laws, Steve Halliwell, says he suspects the Mueller investigators are looking for either Deutsche Bank outflows to Trump organizations that can be traced to big Russian banks, or into any moneys going into Kushner-owned entities related to his massively debt-ridden buildings in Manhattan—or both. He also said that “the vise is tightening” on money laundering generally, around the world, after decades of increased regulation and scrutiny in the United States and Europe. “They are making it very hard for money to move surreptitiously,” Halliwell said.
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Donald, Jr. said in 2008: “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.” A golf writer, James Dodson, reported that brother Eric Trump went further, and more recently, boasting in 2014 that the Trump Organization had access to $100 million in Russian funds. Eric Trump has challenged that report.
The release of Deutsche Bank’s records should solve the dispute.
newsweek.com |
