Deutsche Bank Got Millions From Russian Bank While Also Loaning Huge Sums To Donald Trump, Per ‘Forensic News’
At a time when the German multinational financial institution Deutsche Bank was loaning more than $350 million to Donald Trump, one of the largest banks in Russia was depositing about half-a-billion dollars into the bank’s subsidiary, Deutsche Bank Trust Company Americas (DBTCA), the same subsidiary that made the loans to Trump at a time when other financial institutions shunned him due to a series of bankruptcies. The new revelation was reported on Tuesday by the independent, investigative journalism site Forensic News.
The site, which said its report was based on “exclusively obtained confidential bank records,” wrote that the $511 million deposited by Russia’s Gazprombank could be “dispersed however it directed.”
Whether Trump was one of the “certain entities, individuals or vendors” that Gazprombank directed to receive the money remains unclear. Deutsche Bank refused to name any recipients of the millions in cash, according to Forensic News.
In a statement to Forensic News, Deutsche Bank said that the money was deposited as part of a “cash management” deal allowing the Russian bank to convert large amounts of Russian currency, rubles, to United States dollars.
“At no point has DBTCA ever received loans or a capital injection from Gazprombank or any other Russian bank,” Deutsche Bank said in the statement.
Gazprombank, while technically a private bank, has close links to Vladimir Putin. According to a Reuters investigation, Putin’s son-in-law — Kirill Shamalov, the son of a longtime Putin friend — received a $1 billion loan from Gazprombank in 2014, which he used to buy shares in a petrochemical firm. Those shares are now worth nearly $3 billion.
Shamalov’s brother is a high-ranking official in Gazprombank. The bank’s CEO is Andrey Akimov, a close Putin associate who is listed on the United States Treasury Department’s list of 210 oligarchs and senior political officials whose rise to power came due to their ties to Putin, according to a CNN report.
After his series of casino bankruptcies in the early 1990s, Trump found his credit at most major financial institutions to be ruined. But Deutsche Bank stepped in, loaning Trump about $1 billion over a 12-year-period. When Trump became president, he still owed Deutsche Bank approximately $350 million, according to New York Times editor David Enrich, author of the upcoming book, Dark Towers: The Inside Story Of The World’s Most Destructive Bank, an exposé on the German bank.
Much of the total cash loaned to Trump by the bank came from DBTCA, the same subsidiary that received the $511 million from Gazprombank as part of the “cash management” program, Forensic News reported.
