This case is different from similar cases in the past, primarily because of the extraordinary amounts of money transferred abroad through laundered transactions. The sum is reported to reach 5.5 billion euros.
The Russian Central Bank already asked Deutsche Bank to review Russian customer transactions in October 2014.
In this regard, US authorities are mainly interested in the list of clients involved in illegal transactions. According to Russian sources, the list includes people who also can be found on the lists of the EU and US sanctions and who are close to the Russian government.
US authorities accuse Deutsche Bank of not checking the origin of the money and violating the sanction policy.
In recent years, the US repeatedly has imposed huge fines against European companies and financial institutions, DWN reported. This caused criticism among European officials and negatively affected EU-US relations.
The EU officials claim that the US deliberately “hunted down” European institutions to promote its foreign policy objectives and contributed to capital shifting away from Europe,, DWN reported.