, Columnist
Deutsche Bank's Russian Scheme Isn't Needed in 2017
The German bank paid a fine for helping Russians move money out of the country -- at a time when capital outflow has almost halted
Staying home, for now at least.
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Deutsche Bank, for which fines have become almost a routine expense, has agreed to pay $630 million to end U.S. and U.K. investigations into a scheme that helped wealthy Russians move $10 billion out of Russia. But those clients have little need for such a channel anymore: Capital outflow from Russia has slowed to a trickle.
Between 2012 and late 2014, Deutsche Bank's Moscow office executed a long series of strange trades. Clients instructed it to buy blue-chip Russian securities for rubles and then sell the exact same amounts of these securities in London or New York for foreign currency. Sometimes, Deutsche executed only one side of the "mirror trades," whose only purpose was to expatriate capital.