Deutsche Bank's anti-money laundering specialists once recommended that transactions involving entities controlled by President Donald Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, be reported to a US agency that investigates financial crimes, according to a new report in the New York Times.
The Times reports that Deutsche Bank employees flagged the transactions in 2016 and 2017, and that at least one of the reports involved the Donald J. Trump Foundation, which is now defunct.
Executives at Deutsche Bank rejected the advice of their specialists, according to the Times, which reported that the recommendations were never filed with the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.
The Times, which spoke with five current and former DeutscheBank employees, also said the nature of the transactions "was not clear," though the newspaper added that at least some of them involved "money flowing back and forth with overseas entities or individuals, which bank employees considered suspicious."
The report says the red flags raised by employees "do not necessarily mean the transactions were improper."
The report is significant in part because Deutsche Bank has been one of the few big banks willing to lend money to the Trump Organization in recent years. Trump's businesses have borrowed more than $300 million from Deutsche to finance a golf course in Florida and hotels in Chicago and Washington, according to financial disclosures and public filings from 2012 to 2015.
