Mastermind or scapegoat, Tim Wiswell was at the heart of the bank’s $10 billion mirror-trade scandal.
By Liam Vaughan, Jake Rudnitsky, and Ambereen Choudhury
The U.S. Justice Department and the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority are investigating whether trades that flowed through Wiswell’s desk violated anti-money-laundering rules.
Wiswell, Head of Equities for Deutsche Bank in Moscow, hasn’t been charged, and both agencies declined to comment.
Deutsche Bank has said it could face penalties relating to the Russian debacle by the end of the year.
A list of scandals that also included probes into rigging interest rates and foreign exchange...
Wiswell’s desk, which never had more than a dozen or so employees, carried out thousands of mirror trades over a four-year period. The mechanism itself was pretty straightforward.
A company would buy securities from Deutsche Bank in Moscow for rubles at the same time as another entity owned by the same people in an offshore place like Cyprus, would sell the same shares for dollars via Deutsche Bank’s London office.
The shares would then be transferred between the entities, completing the circle.
The trades spirited money out of Russia at $10 million to $15 million a clip, according to the report. The end-users of the service weren’t revealed. Mirror trades, which aren’t illegal, can be used to aid money laundering and tax avoidance, or to violate sanctions.
Source: Bloomberg
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016 ... 100316_BIZ