Trump, Putin & Co. – Deutsche Bank’s questionable clientele | DW Documentary

Trump, Putin & Co. – Deutsche Bank’s questionable clientele | DW Documentary

It’s the year 2010: Germany’s Lena Meyer-Landrut has won the European Eurovision Song Contest. There’s been a devastating explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Christian Wulff was elected German President. 21 people died at the Love Parade disaster in Duisburg. An unprecedented raid took place. Police officers searching Deutsche Bank would have once seemed unthinkable. Josef Ackermann seen here with his Head of Communications had been at the helm of Deutsche Bank for eight years and had turned it into a bigger player on Wall Street. But at what cost? The accusations against him were staggering. Under the leadership of Mr. Ackermann, the formerly reputable Deutsche Bank has turned into a criminal gambling den. During his time and afterwards, Deutsche Bank has been involved in practically every mess in the banking industry worldwide. One such mess took place in Newport, Rhode Island a haven for sailing aficionados. In August 2010, a dream wedding took place at the exclusive Castle Hill Inn. Friends from all over the world joined the couple on the US Atlantic coast. A wedding magazine captured the moment Tim Wiswell, Deutsche Bank’s head Moscow stock trader, married Russian art historian Natalia Makosiy. The pair later became tangled in a nightmare for Deutsche Bank. Hotel Adlon, November 2010: Vladimir Putin, Russian Prime Minister at the time, was visiting Berlin. He was being courted by the crème de la crème of German business. Everyone wanted to do business with Putin’s Russia. Josef Ackermann had outlined an ambitious vision for Russia’s integration into Europe. Little did anyone know back then that the idea would be a short term one. I remember I was on a panel in Berlin with the heads of Volkswagen and Siemens and Putin. And we were all extremely eager to tap into Russia’s market potential. At that time, I think we were firmly of the opinion that we had to win Russia as a partner and see it as part of Europe. When Josef Ackermann gave us this interview in October 2021, Putin’s war in Ukraine had yet to reach current levels of intensity. Otherwise, he would likely have been more reserved about his friendly relations with Putin. We had a very good relationship. He also appreciated advice, I think, like many others. When Ackermann was elected as CEO of Deutsche Bank in 2002, Russia was playing an increasingly important role. Their relationship was directly protected by the Kremlin. And seemingly a gold-rush was happening at Deutsche Bank’s Moscow branch. I remember that Putin once called Angela Merkel and said, Deutsche Bank is my bank! So Germany and Deutsche Bank were extremely important to him. And we played along too and made good money. "Putin’s bank" also made good money in Moscow because of the kinds of customers it was willing to accept. You need to turn a blind eye potentially to some of the less ethical things that were happening in in Russia at that time, very significant organized crime gangs, all sorts of issues there. But I think Ackermann’s connections to Putin are pretty straightforward and we see the effect of that, you know in in quite a number of the areas that he was involved in. Vladimir Putin and Josef Ackermann met several times at the Kremlin, and in the president’s Novo Ogaryovo residence. The two of them clearly had hit it off. Josef Ackermann and Vladimir Putin were on first-name terms, they spoke German with together, visited each other… Perhaps Josef Ackermann was also flattered that Putin clearly saw him as an important person and appreciated him. Andrei Kostin, head of the Russian state-owned VTB Bank, was part of Putin’s inner circle. Deutsche Bank granted Kostin’s VTB a loan of one billion euros in 2007. When Kostin was looking for a job for his son, Deutsche Bank was also more than happy to oblige. Supporting relatives of high-ranking politicians and officials might seem like common practice in Moscow. But isn’t that corruption? I’ve never seen any corruption at Deutsche Bank. And we would have fought it rigorously if there had been. The bank hired children, or descendants, of functionaries on a large scale for internships and regular jobs. And received business in return. I never saw anything, nor has anything been proven. But the US Securities and Exchange Commission later explicitly accused the bank of bribery. similar conduct took place from 2009 to 2012 in Russia, where Deutsche Bank employees hired relatives at the request of foreign officials in Russia to obtain or retain business or other benefits. After the US Securities and Exchange Commission investigated, they imposed a fine. The bank paid 60 million dollars. Corruption and nepotism weren’t the only factors at play. A former investment banker at Deutsche Bank Moscow wrote in his memoirs: We lived like rock stars drank way too much and smoked cigars way too often. Moscow nightclubs looked like modern-day versions of what went on behind closed doors during prohibition. Money was thrown around like monopoly dollars. When business declined after the banking crisis, "customer care" became increasingly important in Moscow’s nightclubs. Deutsche Bank is trying to compete with local Russian firms. That essentially involved trying to get potential clients to trade with you and essentially to get them to like you. My understanding is that people that would be shown a wild time for three or four days and then sent on a plane back on Sunday looking disheveled but very happy. The former banker writes in his notes: I’m supposed to take clients to brothels! And it’s not enough that I take them there! No, I’ve gotta stay, buy them drinks, help them find women, wait for them to have sex, then pay afterwards! His colleague at the time, Tim Wiswell, had also been enjoying the excessive nightlife in Moscow before he met his partner and married her in America. As more and more people left, he climbed and climbed the ranks. And so Wiswell, at 29 years old, gets promoted into a real position of authority. He becomes head of equities in Russia, which is a very big job. Some clients sought his advice on how to secretly smuggle large sums of money out of the country. Wiswell was the contact person for the money laundering business. So, he was basically the key figure in the whole thing. But it’s important to recognize that the management at Deutsche Bank also held a great deal of responsibility for this money laundering scheme. This is how the money laundering worked: a Russian customer buys shares of stocks from Deutsche Bank, paying in rubles. At the same time, the London branch sells these same shares and receives dollars in return. The dollars are then immediately transferred to the customer’s offshore accounts. Billions are said to have been laundered in this way. Anyone who’s ever watched Star Trek on the television will have seen Captain Kirk on the bridge, and they’ll beam him down to the planet. And what happens is he disappears from the bridge and miraculously reappears on the surface of the planet. And that really is what mirror trades do. This is a fantastic way of making money vanish from Moscow. And reappear in London. And not just that, but it vanishes as rubles and reappears as euros or dollars or pounds. Deutsche Bank’s dealings under the shadow of the Kremlin were highly lucrative, and the bank earned hefty commissions. There are reports from the US Treasury Department, for example, that one client was Vladimir Putin’s cousin. There were also terrorism funders whose clients included the Taliban and Hezbollah. The Russian mafia, the ‘Brothers’ Circle’, is also said to have been a client. These people should not have been customers of Deutsche Bank. The Lubyanka — former headquarters of the KGB secret service is currently used by the Federal Security Service, the FSB. Did spies have any involvement with the transactions at Deutsche Bank? It is very clear that there are FSB connections both with, I think, with people at Deutsche Bank and also with the brokers who are acting on behalf of persons unknown to place these trades with Deutsche Bank. Tim Wiswell and his Russian wife Natalia now live with their family in Bali. She posts on social media as an artist in the jungle. We certainly know that his wife has received some very significant sums of money into her account from people who are also involved in in the mirror trades. Natalia Wiswell is a recognized painter and is invited to international exhibitions. Her husband Tim, on the other hand, lost his job and unsuccessfully sued Deutsche Bank for wrongful dismissal. He said that there were up to 20 people within Deutsche Bank that would have had full oversight and knowledge of exactly what he was doing. So the idea that Wiswell was somehow doing this entirely on his own just doesn’t stand up. Wiswell was a product of the system, and it was a system that Deutsche Bank had built and that Ackermann had overseen and had been very enthusiastic about for many years. Deutsche Bank later had to pay a fine of around 630 million dollars to the American and British banking regulatory authorities for the money laundering in Moscow. A total of 16 billion dollars’ worth of rubles were “beamed” from Moscow to London. It took until late 2015 before the scheme was finally discovered. I was in Deutsche Bank office when the mirror trade situation first emerged. As I say, I can’t talk in any detail about that, but it was it was a bit like an earthquake. You could actually feel those ripples of shock running through the bank in London. Tim and Natalia Wiswell decline to answer questions about their role in the money laundering transactions. In 1998, construction was underway on a new skyscraper in New York. Donald Trump, who had been mainly known as a casino operator, came to inspect the construction site. Even back then, his ego was well known. And it’s going to be the tallest residential tower in the world. But professionally, Trump actually had a rather dubious reputation, marred by bankruptcies and defaults. Throughout his life, he has been a terrible businessman; one failure after another, that was almost his business model. He had a reputation in New York, I met him there, and you knew you couldn’t take him too seriously. But above all, he’s an entertainer. He’s somehow dazzling and entertaining and he’s always welcome at parties. But nobody wanted to lend him money… Edson Mitchell, a key player at Deutsche Bank at the time, also thought Donald Trump was a clown. But he was granted a loan nonetheless. For Deutsche Bank, things unfolded much like they would in a Hollywood movie. These are things that only a screenwriter could come up with. Including Deutsche Bank’s “habit”, in quotation marks, of catering to certain customers, like Donald Trump. In spite of everything, Deutsche Bank lent Trump 125 million dollars in 1998. And that was just the beginning. Further loans and mortgages followed, worth hundreds of millions. I’m not talking about clients, because the situation with Leo Kirch went so poorly. We tightly structured our business with Trump, but it was then broken off, interrupted, and then later resumed in a completely differently way. The "Hollywood" style relationship between Trump and Deutsche Bank began at the height of the financial crisis. In 2008, the Trump Tower in Chicago was under construction. Trump had to repay Deutsche Bank loans worth 334 million dollars, including 40 million for which he was personally liable. But he didn’t have the money. It’s an extraordinary story because, I mean, Trump has on at least one occasion defaulted on loans to Deutsche Bank and they vowed never to do business with him again. But they did start lending to him again, but not through the commercial lending arm through a private wealth manager. Who worked on, you know, as a relationship manager with the Trump family! He also sued Deutsche Bank. He said, the financial crisis that’s why I can’t repay my debts. Alan Greenspan had described the financial crisis as a tsunami. A tsunami is a natural disaster, and the contract actually states that if a force majeure occurs, then that is a reason to withdraw from the contract. That was hard to beat in terms of chutzpah, impudence and audacity. But it worked. When Trump ran for US president in 2016, there was initially little concern from Germany’s financial hub in Frankfurt. Nobody believed the tycoon had a real chance. But in the end, he won. Which meant that a major debtor of Deutsche Bank would be moving into the White House a PR nightmare for the bank. Every single one of its deals with Donald Trump would now be scrutinized. I always say that this was a democratically elected president. And the Democrats, like on the east coast, were making all sorts of claims against Trump, and Deutsche Bank was being instrumentalized in the whole affair. Well, I think those subjects are open to debate. Its connections to Trump and the money that was thrown at him are one of the most embarrassing chapters in the history of Deutsche Bank. Bond movie "Skyfall" hits theaters. Joachim Gauck was elected German Federal President. Borussia Dortmund won the German national football championship. And against the coast of Italy, a captain ran his cruise ship aground. In June 2012, the Institute of International Finance the IIF held a celebration at Kronborg Castle near Copenhagen in honor of Josef Ackermann. Following his resignation as CEO of Deutsche Bank, it was now time to bid him farewell as Chairman of the IIF as well. The position had been tailor-made for him: he was chief diplomat of the international financial industry. Two major roles arguably too much for one person. You could say I didn’t have as much time for Deutsche Bank. There may be something to that. But at the time what was much more important for the banks was finding solutions to the financial crisis and the debt crisis. Because otherwise we probably would have all been in a very difficult situation, we were close to the abyss. May 2012 saw the last Annual General Meeting of Deutsche Bank under Ackermann’s leadership. No one could foresee the financial consequences of his legacy, including fines in the billions. Protests were held outside. A few shareholders spoke out, saying they were counting on long-term returns and were now frustrated. People have lost their savings in the Ackermann era. My shares are only worth a quarter since he took over. To be more precise: in May 2012 the share price was just under 25 euros. At the start of the Ackermann era, it was still at 59 euros. But Ackermann had achieved his other goal: Deutsche Bank became the international leader in terms of total assets. Those successors were Anshu Jain and Jürgen Fitschen. Anshu Jain’s promotion in particular raised some eyebrows. Was I surprised that he rose to be CEO? Not necessarily a very talented guy, but also not surprised with what happened in the end either. Ackermann appreciated Anshu Jain as an investment banker, but didn’t want him as CEO. He said he wasn’t the right person for CEO of Deutsche Bank. I was not against him, no, that’s not true! Anshu Jain was excellent, and I also stood up for him. Perhaps admitting that he was against Anshu Jain would have been admitting his other mistake. Not pushing forward Axel Weber was one, and now not preventing Jain’s ascent was another. This bickering and the intrigue surrounding the succession were unpleasant. That was the ugliest chapter I experienced at the bank. At the end of 2012, police and tax investigators were at the door once again. The raid was about suspected fraudulent transactions. At the time, they even asked the Minister President in Hesse to protect Deutsche Bank from public prosecutors. They said this is unjust why’s there all this commotion here, we’re the good guys! We’re the good guys! Well perhaps, but that was a long time ago. You have to act morally and ethically, but you also have a responsibility to your employees and shareholders. It’s not always possible to be the best citizen and be competitive at the same time. In 2022, Sössen in Saxony-Anhalt had a population of just a few hundred but seven Deutsche Bank-owned companies were registered there. The community of Lützen, which includes Sössen, is seen as a tax haven inside Germany, and at times has had the lowest business tax rate in Germany. During the Ackermann era, several subsidiaries were therefore relocated here, from Frankfurt. The Benefit Trust company was one of them. And next door, under the roof of the fire station, six other Deutsche Bank subsidiaries made a home for themselves. Evading tax by moving to the countryside isn’t illegal, but whether or not it’s a reputable way to conduct business is another matter What you do has to be both legal AND in the interests of the company. It must be legal. But whether that still fulfills what you would expect from someone in business ethically and morally well you can’t be better than the competition allows you to be. St. Petersburg Putin’s home city. This is where his rise to the top began. Josef Ackermann was still drawn to Russia even after his departure as head of Deutsche Bank. Every year in June, business leaders from all over the world meet in St. Petersburg. The International Economic Forum is like a family reunion of the oligarchs who became rich under Putin, or because of him. You have to distinguish between how — let’s say they got their first million. There was a wild west mentality in Russia after everything collapsed. I wouldn’t put my hand in the fire for just anyone. But after they got that initial wealth, many also did great things. In 2012, Ackermann moved to St. Petersburg for his new job at Zurich Insurance. He was invited to a private dinner with Putin, where he made Ackermann an offer. He asked me if I would like to become chairman of the country’s wealth funds, something I couldn’t do because I was already committed to Zurich Insurance. He was so eager to show off how important he was and how kind of connected he was that he would boast about the fact that Putin, of all people, had offered him a job working for the Kremlin after he left. He viewed that as yet another kind of the equivalent of being named banker of the year. This is a guy who has achieved great fame and fortune through his decades working in the banking industry, and you would think he would be content to leave it at that. Ackermann had an especially good rapport with Russian Oligarch Viktor Vekselberg. He was once worth an estimated 15 billion dollars. Vekselberg made his fortune in the aluminium industry, later adding gas and oil to his portfolio. Vekselberg is one of the wealthiest men in Russia and a land full of very wealthy men. He has a company called Renova Group. It’s got operations around the world. Many of his subsidiaries are actually located in Cyprus. It’s a favored place for him to incorporate companies because you get all sorts of advantages from doing so. He’s obviously a close confidant of a Putin. Like many of his colleagues, Vekselberg also owned a super yacht. It was seized in Mallorca in 2022 due to the war in Ukraine. In 2013, Vekselberg opened an art museum for his unique Fabergé egg collection, which he bought for 100 million dollars. The Russian goldsmith Peter Fabergé made them for the Russian tsarist family at the beginning of the 20th century. I actually held Mr. Vekselberg in very high regard. He took over several companies in Switzerland and really wanted to make something of them, and he did. So I only had good things to say about him. Ackermann was appointed to the Board of Directors of Vekselberg’s Renova Holding in Switzerland in February 2014. If you were a leading Western businessman, it’s probably not the type of person you would immediately want to be associated with. There would be a lot of red flags that would pop up. In March 2014, Russian troops occupied Crimea. It’s now clear that for Putin, this was only the first stage in the planned destruction of Ukraine. After the annexation of Crimea, however, Josef Ackermann blamed the West rather than Putin. I think we went too far in isolating Russia and the Russian leadership. And this led them to take a different, more extreme stance. In November 2014, Putin traveled to the G20 summit in Brisbane. He stood smiling on the sidelines for the group photo. While outside, there were violent protests against the occupation of Crimea in violation of international law. It was at this time that Josef Ackermann became involved in Cyprus. Viktor Vekselberg, the oligarch from Putin’s inner circle, asked him to restructure the Bank of Cyprus. Before that, in March 2013, Cyprus was on the brink of bankruptcy. Chaotic scenes were unfolding in front of the banks. Cypriots could no longer access their accounts. The Bank of Cyprus urgently needed fresh money. Vekselberg injected millions and became the largest shareholder. Somehow I felt obliged to help this country. The bank was on the verge of bankruptcy, was in all sorts of trouble, and of the course money laundering and everything else was a big issue. Cyprus is a sunny place for dark business. You could do things there that you couldn’t have done anywhere else. And that’s why Cyprus offered itself as a money laundering machine. Rich Russians in particular saw Cyprus as a second home. Many of the huge sums that were lifted out of Moscow with the help of Deutsche Bank also ended up in Cypriot accounts. And Deutsche Bank’s former boss Ackermann was now attempting to combat money laundering in Cyprus. A dubious coincidence. At the same time that their former CEO was the chairman of this bank in Cyprus, the Deutsche Bank kind of ignored red flags and ignored what other banks were doing, which was moving very quickly away from the Cypriot banks and continue doing business with them. Now that’s the benign scenario that it’s all kind of a happy coincidence or unhappy coincidence. Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg is on the latest US sanctions list and his assets have been frozen in the US. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Vekselberg was hit with even tougher sanctions in March 2022. By May 2015, the German financial supervisory authority BaFin had reached a breaking point with Deutsche Bank’s machinations. It wrote a letter to the Management Board that put Anshu Jain in particular in the firing line. I consider the failures with which Mr. Jain is charged to be serious. They display improper management and organization of the business. The letter from BaFin took down almost the entire management team of Deutsche Bank in an impressive manner. It pretty much put each individual through the wringer. And of course Anshu Jain at the forefront. Anshu Jain resigned from his post shortly afterwards. Up to his death in 2022, he refused to respond to inquiries about his time at Deutsche Bank. Deutsche Bank’s share price stagnated during this period and then plummeted to an all-time low of less than 6 euros in March 2020. It’s only recovered moderately since then and stood at around 12 euros at the start of 2022. Would the era of excessive investment banking at Deutsche Bank come to an end after Jain’s resignation? The new CEO had to announce some bad news. Deutsche Bank was earning too little. For the second time, we’re talking about a year that was anything but easy for Deutsche Bank. Deutsche Bank began working through its past mistakes. Ackermann’s former employees, who’d climbed the ladder to board members, were among the fiercest critics. There were people at Deutsche Bank who were not honest, or we wouldn’t have ended up where we did. I also don’t want to go back to the times we had between 2000 and 2010. Nobody here wants that! Other senior executives at Deutsche Bank, including the current Chief Economist, are also publicly addressing the Ackermann era. Are you upset about the criticism that came even from within your own ranks? Yes, well, some of it came from people that I hadn’t promoted and who wanted revenge. You shouldn’t take individual opinions like that too seriously, precisely because they often come from people who weren’t considered fit for a higher job because of their character or expertise. But they somehow got one anyway. And they wanted payback. It’s so easy to blame your predecessors. Then you have less of a burden on your own shoulders. That had never really been done at Deutsche Bank before. There was always a very strong sense of camaraderie. Josef Ackermann had always believed in camaraderie at Deutsche Bank. And perhaps also here too. At the traditional Sechseläuten parade in Zurich in 2017, where he marched in a blue rococo uniform. But now the former top banker was being publicly shamed, by his own people and by journalists. I don’t think I can think of any problem that Deutsche Bank now faces that’s not a result, at least in part of the Ackermann era. He created a culture that encouraged this type of recklessness and at times encouraged this type of criminality. There’s no way around that, no matter what kind of happy face Ackermann wants to put on it, and no matter how much blame he wants to cast on his subordinates. At the end of the Ackermann decade, profit after tax amounted to 28.1 billion euros. All the fines and settlements that were incurred during this period added up to between 15 and 20 billion euros. In other words, more than half of the profit. And that’s an interesting outcome for a bank that was trying to be a major player and earn billions of dollars. You can’t gloss over it, it’s a black mark and you have to ask yourself how it came about. The answer is clear: instead of taming greed, it was fueled by ever higher bonuses under Ackermann’s leadership. During the Ackermann era, annual bonus payments climbed to 4.3 billion euros. After his departure, they steadily fell, hitting 0.5 billion by 2016. So had Deutsche Bank finally learned its lesson? Once again, the police were at the door and searching employees’ offices. The new man at the helm is Christian Sewing, pictured here with Achleitner, Chairman of the Supervisory Board. He’s as eloquent as Josef Ackermann. But can he change the bank’s culture? Sewing is a product of Deutsche Bank itself, and high hopes have been pinned on him. We should have moved directly from the Ackermann era to the Sewing era; this detour via the Jain/Fitschen duo cost time, and led to an even bigger clean-up operation. Sewing is faced with gigantic clean-up costs, including fines, settlements and legal fees caused by his predecessors. He’s campaigning for new values. But will he dare to cut back on investment banking? Sewing initially played into the hands of the German public by saying that we were scaling back investment banking and ramping up the lending business. He very quickly corrected this statement. Deutsche Bank says that there’s more control on the trading floor today. But is greed really under control? Between 2016 and 2021, bonuses, which had fallen drastically after the Ackermann era, climbed again, from 0.5 billion to 2.1 billion in 2021. It’s probably true that investment banking is where the profits are coming from and that all the bank’s other business is not yielding much. But the bank has positioned itself in that way, it hasn’t pursued the broad customer business so intensively. There are direct model banks in Germany that are constantly gaining new customers who generate profit and are doing well. The investment banking department of Deutsche Bank in Moscow was shut down at the end of 2015 in the wake of the money laundering scandal. But, unlike its competitors, the rest of its operations were not ceased when Putin launched his attack. This is Kyiv tonight. The capital of Ukraine with almost three million inhabitants is under attack. People all over the country are seeking safety in the subway. Those who can flee are finding that it’s no longer possible. Vladimir Putin is attacking Ukraine. In Moscow, celebrations on May 9th 2022 marked the anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany. The question remains: how could the world, including Josef Ackermann, have been so swept away by an ex-KGB operative leading the Russian state? Ackermann maybe thought that he could influence this person who’d grow the economy in Russia. It is rich with minerals and oil and all sorts of things. It could be a powerhouse of an economy. But it is just rife with corruption. So maybe Ackermann just convinced himself that he could somehow be instrumental in a great economic story that would that would cast him in a very good light. Deutsche Bank’s share price fell to around 9 euros after the start of the war in Ukraine. It wasn’t much higher before that a far cry from its value twenty years earlier. Perhaps at some point, Deutsche Bank will be bought out. The share price is not high. Deutsche Bank is not expensive. We’re talking about billions but it’s still cheap compared to all other banks ranked above it. Those are the expensive ones. In terms of total assets, Deutsche Bank slipped to 21st place in 2021. It has long ceased to be a first-class financial institution. Like a never ending story, investigators were back at the building in late April 2022. This time they arrived discreetly in neutral vehicles. As if the bank’s reputation still had to be taken into consideration. Deutsche Bank’s image has been destroyed. Once the pinnacle of Germany’s banking sector, it’s now burdened by its horrendous past.

Deutsche Bank managers driven by greed set it on the wrong track in the 2000s. For many years, the financial institution maintained close ties with Vladimir Putin. And involved itself in shady deals with the Russian autocrat.

In the early 2000s, Deutsche Bank wanted to make it big in Moscow. For some employees, this was something to be achieved by any means necessary: bribing Putin’s officials, brothel visits for good customers, money laundering for the mafia.

When it all came to light, this sent a shock wave through the bank: to this day, Deutsche Bank is still laboring under the burden of fines totaling billions. But the CEOs claimed total innocence. Just one of many scandals.

Other questionable deals include loans to Donald Trump. The bank’s very special relationship with the US-American real estate tycoon began in the year 1998. Trump was one of Deutsche Bank’s best customers until shortly before his 2017 presidency. The credit institute loaned him huge sums – despite his track record for business bankruptcy and a dubious reputation as a defaulting debtor.

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