Deutsche Bank Fined $630m

Deutsche Bank has agreed to pay $630 million in fines for organizing $10 billion in sham trades that could have been used to launder money out of Russia, the latest in a string of penalties that have hammered the German lender’s finances, Reuters reported. In two detailed reports, US and British regulators criticized the bank for not knowing the customers involved or the source of money for the trades, which helped buoy revenue during a slowdown following the global financial crash. The scheme involved so-called mirror trades carried out between 2011 to 2015—for instance, buying Russian stocks in rubles for a client and selling the identical value of a security for US dollars for a related customer. The New York Department of Financial Services outlined a web of trades “converting rubles into dollars through security trades that had no economic purpose” and stretched from Moscow, London and New York to Cyprus and the British Virgin Islands.