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

The year is 2010: Germany's Lena Meyer-Landrut won the European Eurovision Song Contest. There has been a devastating explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico. Christian Wulff was elected German president. 21 people died in the Love Parade disaster in Duisburg. An unprecedented raid took place. A police search of Deutsche Bank would have seemed unthinkable. Josef Ackermann, seen here with his communications chief, had run Deutsche Bank for eight years and built it into a bigger player on Wall Street. But at what price? The accusations against him were astonishing. Under Mr. Ackermann's leadership, the once prestigious Deutsche Bank has become a criminal gambling den.

During his time and after, Deutsche Bank has been involved in virtually every mess in the

bank

ing industry around the world. One such disaster took place in Newport, Rhode Island, a paradise for boating enthusiasts. A dream wedding took place in August 2010 at the exclusive Castle Hill Inn. Friends from around the world joined the couple on the Atlantic coast of the United States. A wedding magazine captured the moment Tim Wiswell, Deutsche Bank's top Moscow stockbroker, married Russian art historian Natalia Makosiy. Subsequently, both were involved in a nightmare for Deutsche Bank. Adlon Hotel, November 2010: Vladimir Putin, then Russian Prime Minister, was visiting Berlin.

He was 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. Nobody knew then that the idea would be short-term. I remember being on a panel in Berlin with the heads of Volkswagen, Siemens and Putin. And we were all very eager to take advantage of Russia's market potential. At that time, I think we were firmly convinced that we had to win over 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 not yet reached current levels of intensity.

Otherwise, he probably would have been more reserved about his friendly relations with Putin. We had a very good relationship. I think he also appreciated the advice, like many others. When Ackermann was elected CEO of Deutsche Bank in 2002, Russia was playing an increasingly important role. Their relationship was directly protected by the Kremlin. And apparently a gold rush was underway at Deutsche Bank's Moscow branch. I remember Putin once called Angela Merkel and said: Deutsche Bank is my

bank

! Therefore, Germany and Deutsche Bank were extremely important to him. And we also played along and made a lot of money. "Putin's bank" also made a lot of money in Moscow because of the type of clients he was willing to accept.

It is necessary to turn a blind eye to some of the less ethical things that were happening in Russia at the time, very important organized crime gangs and all kinds of problems there. But I think Ackermann's connections to Putin are pretty straightforward and we see the effect of that, you know, in many of the areas in which he was involved. Vladimir Putin and Josef Ackermann met several times in the Kremlin and in the president's office. Novo Ogaryovo Residence. The two had clearly hit it off. Josef Ackermann and Vladimir Putin called each other by their first names, spoke German 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 bank VTB, was part of Putin's inner circle. In 2007, Deutsche Bank granted Kostin's VTB a loan of one billion euros. When Kostin was looking for a job for his son, Deutsche Bank was also more than willing to oblige. Supporting relatives of politicians and high-ranking officials might seem like common practice in Moscow. But isn't that corruption? I have never seen corruption at Deutsche Bank. And we would have fought it rigorously if there had been one.

The bank hired children, or descendants, of officials on a large scale to carry out internships and regular jobs. And he received business in return. I never saw anything, nor has anything been proven. But the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission later explicitly accused the bank of bribery. Similar conduct occurred between 2009 and 2012 in Russia, where Deutsche Bank employees hired family members at the request of foreign officials in Russia to obtain or retain business or other benefits. After the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigated, it imposed a fine. The bank paid 60 million dollars. Corruption and nepotism were not the only factors at play.

A former investment banker at Deutsche Bank of Moscow wrote in his memoirs: We lived like rock stars who drank too much and smoked cigars too often. Moscow nightclubs seemed like modern versions of what went on behind closed doors during prohibition. Money was wasted as monopoly dollars. When business declined after the banking crisis, "customer service" became increasingly important in Moscow nightclubs. Deutsche Bank is trying to compete with local Russian companies. Basically, that involved trying to get potential customers to do business with you and basically get them to like you. My understanding is that people 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 for me to take them there! No, I have to stay, buy them drinks, help them find women, wait for them to have sex and then pay! Her colleague at the time, Tim Wiswell, also enjoyed the excessive nightlife in Moscow before meeting and marrying her partner in the United States. As more and more people left, he rose and rose through the ranks. And so Wiswell, at 29, is promoted to a real position of authority. He becomes head of stocks in Russia, which is a very important job.

Some clients sought his advice on how to 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 is important to recognize that the management of Deutsche Bank also had a great responsibility in this money laundering scheme. This is how money laundering was carried out: a Russian client buys Deutsche Bank shares paying in rubles. At the same time, the London branch sells those same shares and receives dollars in exchange. The dollars are then immediately transferred to the client's offshore accounts.

It is said that billions have been laundered in this way. Anyone who has seen Star Trek on television will have seen Captain Kirk on the bridge and being transported to the planet. And what happens is that he disappears from the bridge and miraculously reappears on the planet's surface. And that's really what mirror operations do. This is a fantastic way to make money disappear from Moscow. And reappear in London. And not only that, but it disappears as rubles and reappears as euros, dollars or pounds. Deutsche Bank's business under the shadow of the Kremlin was very lucrative and the bank earned high commissions.

There are reports from the US Treasury Department, for example, that one client was a cousin of Vladimir Putin. There were also terrorist financiers whose clients included the Taliban and Hezbollah. The Russian mafia, the "Circle of Brothers", is also said to have been a client. These people should not have been clients of Deutsche Bank. The Lubyanka, former headquarters of the KGB secret service, is currently used by the Federal Security Service, the FSB. Did the spies have any connection with the transactions at Deutsche Bank? It is very clear that there are FSB connections both, I believe, with people at Deutsche Bank and also with the brokers who act on behalf of unknown people to carry out these operations with Deutsche Bank.

Tim Wiswell and his Russian wife Natalia now live with his family in Bali. He posts on social media as a jungle artist. We know for a fact that his wife has received significant sums of money into her account from people who also engage in mirror trading. Natalia Wiswell is a renowned painter and is invited to international exhibitions. Her husband Tim, on the other hand, lost his job and unsuccessfully sued Deutsche Bank for unfair dismissal. He said there were up to 20 people within Deutsche Bank who would have had full supervision and knowledge of exactly what he was doing.

So the idea that Wiswell was somehow doing this on her behalf just doesn't hold water. Wiswell was a product of the system, and it was a system that Deutsche Bank had built and that Ackermann had overseen and that he had been very enthusiastic about for many years. Deutsche Bank subsequently had to pay a fine of around $630 million to American and British banking regulators for money laundering in Moscow. In total, rubles worth 16 billion dollars were "transmitted" from Moscow to London. We had to wait until the end of 2015 for the plan to finally be discovered. I was in the Deutsche Bank office when the mirror trading situation first arose.

Like I say, I can't talk in detail about it, but it was a bit like an earthquake. In fact, you could feel those waves of shock running through the London bank. Tim and Natalia Wiswell refuse to answer questions about their role in the money laundering transactions. In 1998 a new skyscraper was being built in New York. Donald Trump, known primarily as a casino operator, came to inspect the work. Even then his ego was well known. And it will be the tallest residential tower in the world. But professionally, Trump actually had a rather dubious reputation, tarnished 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 is an entertainer. He is somehow dazzling and entertaining and is always welcome at parties. But no one wanted to lend him money... Edson Mitchell, a key player at Deutsche Bank at the time, also thought Donald Trump was a clown. But they still granted him a loan. For Deutsche Bank things unfolded like a Hollywood movie. These are things that only a screenwriter could think of.

Including Deutsche Bank's “habit,” in quotes, of catering to certain clients, like Donald Trump. Despite everything, Deutsche Bank lent Trump $125 million in 1998. And that was just the beginning. More loans and mortgages worth hundreds of millions followed. I'm not talking about clients, because the situation with Leo Kirch went very badly. We closely structured our business with Trump, but then it was interrupted, interrupted, and then resumed in a completely different way. The "Hollywood" relationship between Trump and Deutsche Bank began at the height of the financial crisis. In 2008, Trump Tower in Chicago was under construction. Trump had to repay Deutsche Bank loans worth $334 million, of which $40 million was personally responsible.

But he didn't have the money. It's an extraordinary story because, I mean, Trump on at least one occasion defaulted on loan payments to Deutsche Bank and they promised never to do business with him again. But they started lending to him again, but not through the commercial lending arm through a private wealth manager. Who worked, you know, as a relationship manager with the Trump family! He also sued Deutsche Bank. He said that the financial crisis is the reason why I can't pay my debts. Alan Greenspan 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 terminate the contract.

That was hard to beat in terms of chutzpah, chutzpah and audacity. But it worked. When Trump ran for US president in 2016, there was initially little concern from Germany's financial center in Frankfurt. Nobody believed that the tycoon had any real chances. But in the end he won. Which meant that a major Deutsche Bank debtor would land in the White House, a public relations nightmare for the bank. Every one of his 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 kinds of claims against Trump, and Deutsche Bank was being instrumentalized in the whole thing.

Well, I think those topics are open for debate. His connections to Trump and the money they threw at him are one of the most shameful chapters in Deutsche Bank's history. The Bond movie "Skyfall" hits theaters. Joachim Gauck was elected federal presidentGerman. Borussia Dortmund won the German national soccer championship. And off the coast of Italy, a captain ran his cruise ship aground. In June 2012, the Institute of International Finance (IIF) held a celebration at Kronborg Castle near Copenhagen in honor of Josef Ackermann. After his resignation as CEO of Deutsche Bank, it was time to also say goodbye to him as president of the IIF.

The position was tailor-made for him: he was the chief diplomat of the international financial industry. Two major roles are arguably too many for one person. You could say that he didn't have that much time for Deutsche Bank. There may be something to that. But at that time what was much more important for the banks was to find solutions to the financial crisis and the debt crisis. Because otherwise we would probably all have been in a very difficult situation, we were close to the abyss. In May 2012, the last Annual General Meeting of Deutsche Bank was held under Ackermann's leadership.

No one could foresee the financial consequences of his legacy, including billions in fines. The protests took place outside. Some shareholders said 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 beginning of the Ackermann era it still cost 59 euros. But Ackermann had achieved his other goal: Deutsche Bank became an international leader in terms of total assets. Those successors were Anshu Jain and Jürgen Fitschen.

Anshu Jain's promotion in particular caught attention. Was I surprised that he became CEO? He's not necessarily a very talented guy, but I'm also not surprised by what happened in the end. Ackermann liked Anshu Jain as an investment banker, but he did not want him as a CEO. He said that he was not the right person to be CEO of Deutsche Bank. I wasn't against him, no, that's not true! Anshu Jain was excellent and I also defended him. Perhaps admitting that he was against Anshu Jain would have been admitting his other mistake. Not promoting Axel Weber was one, and now not preventing Jain's rise was another.

These disputes and the intrigue surrounding the succession were unpleasant. That was the ugliest chapter I experienced at the bank. At the end of 2012, the police and tax inspectors came knocking again. The raid was due to suspicions of fraudulent transactions. At that time they even asked the Hessian Minister President to protect Deutsche Bank from prosecutors. They said this is unfair, why is there so much commotion here? We are the good ones! We are the good ones! Well, maybe, 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 is not always possible to be the best citizen and be competitive at the same time. In 2022, Sössen in Saxony-Anhalt had only a few hundred inhabitants, but seven companies owned by Deutsche Bank were registered there. The community of Lützen, which includes Sössen, is seen as a tax haven within Germany and has at times had the lowest business tax rate in Germany. Therefore, during the Ackermann era, several subsidiaries moved 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 taxes by moving to the countryside is not illegal, but whether or not it is a respectable way of doing business is another question. What you do has to be legal AND in the interest of the company. It must be legal. But if that still meets what you would expect from someone in business who is ethically and morally sound, it can't be better than the competition allows it to be. St. Petersburg, Putin's hometown. Here began his rise to the top. Josef Ackermann continued to be attracted to Russia even after his departure as head of Deutsche Bank.

Every year in June, business leaders from around the world gather 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 anyone. But after gaining that initial wealth, many also went on to do great things. In 2012, Ackermann moved to St. Petersburg to take 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 be president of the country's endowment funds, something I couldn't do because he was already committed to Zurich Insurance. He was so eager to show how important he was and how connected he was that he bragged about the fact that Putin, of all people, had offered him a job for the Kremlin after he left. He considered that to be another kind of equivalent to being named banker of the year. This is a guy who has achieved great fame and fortune over his decades working in the banking industry, and you'd think he'd be content to leave it at that.

Ackermann had an especially good relationship with the Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg. He was once worth an estimated $15 billion. Vekselberg made his fortune in the aluminum industry and later added gas and oil to his portfolio. Vekselberg is one of the richest men in Russia and a land full of very rich men. He has a company called Renova Group. He has operations all over the world. In fact, many of its subsidiaries are located in Cyprus. It is a privileged place for him to establish companies because by doing so all kinds of advantages are obtained. He obviously he is a close confidant of Putin.

Like many of his colleagues, Vekselberg also owned a superyacht. He was seized in Mallorca in 2022 due to the Ukrainian war. In 2013, Vekselberg opened an art museum for his unique collection of Fabergé eggs, which he purchased for $100 million. Russian goldsmith Peter Fabergé made them for the Russian tsarist family at the beginning of the 20th century. In fact, he held Mr. Vekselberg in high regard. He took over several companies in Switzerland and really wanted to do something with 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 prominent Western businessman, you're probably not the kind of person you'd want to immediately partner with. Many warning signs would appear. In March 2014, Russian troops occupied Crimea. It is now clear that for Putin this was only the first stage of the planned destruction of Ukraine. However, after the annexation of Crimea, Josef Ackermann blamed the West and not Putin. I think we went too far in isolating Russia and the Russian leadership. And this led them to adopt a different, more extreme position. In November 2014, Putin traveled to the G20 summit in Brisbane. He stood smiling on the sidelines of the group photo.

While outside, there were violent protests against the occupation of Crimea in violation of international law. It was around this time that Josef Ackermann became involved in Cyprus. Viktor Vekselberg, the oligarch in 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 unfolded in front of the banks. Cypriots could no longer access their accounts. The Bank of Cyprus urgently needed fresh money. Vekselberg pumped in millions and became the largest shareholder. Somehow I felt compelled to help this country. The bank was on the verge of bankruptcy, it had all kinds of problems and of course money laundering and everything else was a big problem.

Cyprus is a sunny place for dark business. There you could do things you wouldn't have been able to do anywhere else. And that is why Cyprus was presented as a money laundering machine. Wealthy Russians, in particular, saw Cyprus as a second home. Many of the huge sums taken out of Moscow with the help of Deutsche Bank also ended up in Cypriot accounts. And former Deutsche Bank boss Ackermann was now trying to combat money laundering in Cyprus. A dubious coincidence. At the same time that its former CEO was president of this bank in Cyprus, Deutsche Bank ignored the warning signs and ignored what other banks were doing, which were very quickly moving away from the Cypriot banks and continuing to do business with them.

That's the benign scenario of everything being a happy coincidence or an unhappy coincidence. Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg is on the latest US sanctions list and his assets have been frozen in the United States. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Vekselberg received even tougher sanctions in March 2022. By May 2015, the German financial supervisory authority, BaFin, had reached a breaking point with the machinations of Deutsche Bank. He wrote a letter to the board that put Anshu Jain in particular in the line of fire. I consider the failures attributed to Mr. Jain to be serious. They manifest inadequate management and organization of the business.

The BaFin letter impressively brought down almost the entire management team at Deutsche Bank. It practically put every individual on the spot. And of course Anshu Jain at the forefront. Anshu Jain resigned from his position soon after. Until his death in 2022, he refused to answer questions about his time at Deutsche Bank. The Deutsche Bank share price stagnated during this period and then plummeted to a record low of less than 6 euros in March 2020. Since then it has only recovered moderately and at the beginning of 2022 it stood at around 12 euros . Is banking at Deutsche Bank coming to an end after Jain's resignation?

The new CEO had to announce bad news. Deutsche Bank earned very little. For the second time, we are talking about a not easy year for Deutsche Bank. Deutsche Bank began to overcome its past mistakes. Former Ackermann employees, who had risen to become board members, were among the fiercest critics. There were people at Deutsche Bank who weren't honest, or else we wouldn't have ended up where we ended up. 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, also publicly refer to the Ackermann era.

Is he upset by the criticism that comes even from within his own ranks? Yeah, well, some of it came from people who hadn't been promoted and who wanted revenge. You should not take individual opinions like this too seriously, precisely because they often come from people who were not considered suitable for a higher position due to their character or experience. But somehow they got one anyway. And they wanted revenge. It is very easy to blame your predecessors. Then you will have less burden on your shoulders. This has never been done before at Deutsche Bank. There was always a very strong feeling of camaraderie.

Josef Ackermann had always believed in camaraderie at Deutsche Bank. And maybe here too. At the traditional Sechseläuten parade in Zurich in 2017, where he paraded 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 Deutsche Bank faces now that isn't 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 it, no matter what kind of happy face Ackermann wants to put on and no matter how much blame he wants to put on his subordinates.

At the end of Ackermann's decade, profit after tax amounted to €28.1 billion. All fines and settlements incurred during this period amounted to between 15 and 20 billion euros. That is, more than half of the profit. And that's an interesting result for a bank that was trying to be a major player and make billions of dollars. It cannot be ignored, it is 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-increasing bonuses under Ackermann's leadership. During the Ackermann era, annual bonus payments amounted to €4.3 billion.

After he left, they fell steadily, reaching 500 million in 2016. So had Deutsche Bank finally learned its lesson? Once again the police were at the door and searching the employees' offices. The new man at the helm is Christian Sewing, pictured with Achleitner, chairman of the supervisory board. He is as eloquent as Josef Ackermann. But can the bank's culture change? Sewing is a product of Deutsche Bank itself and great hopes have been placed on it. We should have gone straight from the Ackermann era to the Sewing era; This detour through the Jain/Fitschen duo cost time and led to an even larger clean-up operation.

Sewing faces huge cleanup costs, including fines, settlements and legal feescaused by their predecessors. He is campaigning for new values. But will he dare to cut investment banking? At first, Sewing played into the hands of the German public, saying we were shrinking investment banking and strengthening the lending business. He quickly corrected this statement. Deutsche Bank says that today there is more control on the trading floor. But is greed really under control? Between 2016 and 2021, bonuses, which had fallen sharply after the Ackermann era, rose again, from 500 million to 2.1 billion in 2021. It's probably true that investment banking is where the profits come from and that everyone else The bank's business is not performing well.

But the bank has positioned itself that way and hasn't focused as intensely on the broader customer business. In Germany there are direct model banks that constantly gain new customers who generate profits and do well. Deutsche Bank's investment banking department in Moscow closed at the end of 2015 in the wake of the money laundering scandal. But unlike its competitors, the rest of its operations did not cease when Putin launched his attack. This is Kyiv tonight. The capital of Ukraine, with almost three million inhabitants, is under attack. People across the country seek safety in the subway. Those who can flee discover that it is no longer possible.

Vladimir Putin is attacking Ukraine. In Moscow, celebrations on May 9, 2022 marked the anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany. The question remains: how could the world, including Josef Ackermann, have been so swept up by a former KGB agent at the head of the Russian state? Ackermann perhaps thought that he could influence this person who would grow the economy in Russia. He is rich in minerals, oil and all kinds of things. He could be a powerhouse of an economy. But it is riddled with corruption. So maybe Ackermann simply convinced himself that he could somehow be instrumental in a great economic story 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. Before it was not much higher, very far from its value twenty years before. Maybe at some point Deutsche Bank will be bought. The stock price is not high. Deutsche Bank is not expensive. We're talking billions, but it's still cheap compared to all the other banks ranked above it. Those are the expensive ones. In terms of total assets, Deutsche Bank fell to 21st place in 2021. It has long ceased to be a top-class financial institution. Like a never-ending story, investigators returned to the building at the end of April 2022.

This time they arrived discreetly in neutral vehicles. As if the bank's reputation still had to be taken into account. Deutsche Bank's image has been destroyed. What was once the pinnacle of Germany's banking sector is now burdened by its horrendous past.