NIKK..I’m working on banks..to see where it leads.
February 27, 2020, 10:23 a.m.
Investigation
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Cum-ex-raid on Dutch bank in Frankfurt
Armed police officers entered the building: the aim of the action is the large bank ABN Amro.
By Jan Willmroth , Frankfurt
Due to cum-ex-transactions at the expense of the state treasury, investigators with a large police force moved into the banking district of Frankfurt on Thursday. According to information from the Süddeutscher Zeitung and WDR, the action is aimed at the major Dutch bank ABN Amro. According to eyewitnesses, several team cars and other emergency vehicles drove up to their German branch on Mainzer Landstrasse on Thursday morning, and armed police officers entered the building. In addition to prosecutors, officials from the Federal Criminal Police Office, the Federal Police and the tax investigation department were on duty.
The institute will be searched for the second time within a few months. Unlike in mid-November, the investigators apparently decided this time to be less discreet. In the context of the investigations into tax-driven stock transactions, which has been going on for years, such a large-scale campaign is rare. According to information from SZ and WDR, the Cologne public prosecutor is leading the measures this time.
ABN Amro is said to have been involved in various Cum-Ex cycles. This emerges from testimony from the Cologne public prosecutor’s office as well as knowledge from several cum-ex proceedings, including proceedings by the Frankfurt public prosecutor’s office. In a very simplified way, business is about simulating tax payments and having a single dividend tax refunded several times. In this context, law enforcement officers are investigating several hundred suspects on suspicion of serious tax evasion and have been targeting banks for years. The tax damage is in the billions.
The Frankfurt Attorney General had announced during the first searches at ABN Amro in November that six people were suspected of serious tax evasion in connection with the stock deals, including two former authorized officers of “a Frankfurt investment bank”. The accused are said to have done cum-ex transactions in the hundreds of millions in 2008 and 2009. The tax offices were misled by false tax certificates. Damage according to the General Prosecutor’s Office: 53.3 million euros. The two former authorized officers are said to have “processed” short sales via the bank, it said in a statement by the authority in November.
The Cologne public prosecutor apparently mainly investigates cases from the years after 2009 in two investigative complexes. The main suspects include several former managers of one of the predecessor institutes of today’s ABN Amro group. The mother institute of the German private bank Bethmann emerged from the once nationalized Belgian-Dutch bank Fortis and the then ABN Amro after the financial crisis. The Dutch state still owns 56.3 percent of the shares in the bank.
A spokesman for ABN Amro said that the exact background of the raid was not yet known. “ABN Amro is cooperating fully with the German authorities,” it said in writing. In the current quarterly report, the bank explicitly mentioned its cum-ex involvement. Several predecessors of the banking group were involved “directly or indirectly” in these transactions, it says. The group, based in Amsterdam, cooperates with the authorities in Germany and provides requested information “to the greatest possible extent”. That the investigators move into the institute a second time, and then with so much blue light, suggests that they disagree on the last point - because most of the raids related to Cum-Ex hardly anyone notices ,
Not far from the scene of the current raid, there was a comparable case almost eight years ago. In the scandal surrounding tax fraud with CO certificates, 500 civil servants, some of whom were heavily armed and helmeted, had marched into the headquarters of Deutsche Bank - an unequivocal reaction to the fact that, despite clear warnings, the bank did not find it necessary to cooperate with the investigators ,
Researcher at University Arrested for Wire Fraud and Making False Statements About Affiliation with a Chinese University
Anming Hu, a an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK) was arrested today on a federal indictment and charged with three counts of wire fraud and three counts of making false statements.
“Hu allegedly committed fraud by hiding his relationship with a Chinese university while receiving funding from NASA,” said Assistant Attorney General for National Security John C. Demers. “This is just the latest case involving professors or researchers concealing their affiliations with China from their American employers and the U.S. government. We will not tolerate it.”
“The United States Attorney’s Office takes seriously fraudulent conduct that is devised to undermine federally-mandated funding restrictions related to China and Chinese universities,” said U.S. Attorney J. Douglas Overbey for the Eastern District of Tennessee. “The University of Tennessee has cooperated with the investigation, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office values the university’s assistance in this matter.”
The indictment alleges that beginning in 2016, Hu engaged in a scheme to defraud the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) by concealing his affiliation with Beijing University of Technology (BJUT), a university in China. Federal law prohibits NASA from using appropriated funds on projects in collaboration with China or Chinese universities. As alleged in the indictment, Hu’s false representations and omissions to UTK about his affiliation with BJUT caused UTK to falsely certify to NASA that UTK was in compliance with this federal law.
If convicted, Hu faces up to 20 years in federal prison and a fine up to $250,000 on each of the wire fraud counts, and up to five years in prison on each of the false statement counts.
The maximum potential sentences in this case are prescribed by Congress and are provided here for informational purposes only, as any sentencing of the defendants will be determined by the assigned judge. In all cases, defendants are presumed innocent until and unless proven guilty; indictments merely contain allegations supported by probable cause.
The case is being investigated by the FBI, the Offices of the Inspectors General for NASA and the Department of Energy. The case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Casey Arrowood and Frank Dale of the Eastern District of Tennessee, and Trial Attorney Nathan Charles of the National Security Division’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section.