to move tons and tons and tons of illegal russian money out of russia and into the west. and i mean tons of money. this was multiple billions of dollars, more than 6,000 trades using multiple deutsche bank offices over a period of years. and part of the reason they got away with it for so long and to such a huge extent is because this big legit seeming bank was involved. they couldn t have done it without deutsche bank fa significasill tating these trades. and deutsche bank couldn t do it without connections in russia. because nobody gets hundred of millions, let alone multiple billions of dollars shuffled out of russia without the russian government being in on it and saying okay. in the new book collusion it reports out some of the apparent russian government involvement in this scheme. you know how they say in american personnel is policy? in russian politics, personnel
but because it went through a big legit european bank, this scheme they were running was super effective at moving money not just once but lots and lots of times, tons and tochbs monies out of russia and into the west and they were able to keep the scheme going for years before people finally started to realize that even though this was a legit looking european bank there are was a huge fairly simple criminal operation that they were running with russian illegal money. and it, again, it was pretty simple. i mean, usually money laundering is designed to be purposely complicated so you can t follow the money. this was a simple scheme. you can t just ship your money from russia like wire it to the cayman islands or cypress or new york or london and deposit it. you ll get caught doing it that way if you re a russian crook. so instead what you do is you say i don t want just to send my money abroad to park it somewhere, i don t want to just open an account in a foreign country and move it t
prosecute me or persecute me for the way that i illegally got this money, they won t be able to find it and reclaim it. trace it back to me. so let s say just for the sake of argument the amount of money that i, crook, want to get out of russia is like $10 million. if i want to get $10 million out of russia, i ideally want to convert it from rubles into some other currency, preferably dollars. in order for me to get that money out of russia without anybody noticing, it has to look like that money is leaving the country as some part of legitimate transaction, and, on the down low, slightly i probably also immediate it to be okay with putin that i m taking that money out because he tends to know these things. that s where deutsche bank comes in. there s a lot of ditch ways to launder money, but from about 2011 to 2015, deutsche bank ran this scheme that was not very complicated at all when it comes to money laundering schemes.
that didn t bark in the trump administration, is because while deutsche bank was in this years long, multibillion dollars money making scheme to laurnder money out of russia, they, also cultivating an otherwise sort of inexplicable major financial relationship with now president trump. let me quote luke harding again from his new book collusion . a kremlin bank vtb run by prox sies of the russian intelligence services had captured deutsche bank s moscow outpost. deutsche bank london and new york divisions were beneficiaries of this arrangement. while it was going on, deutsche bank in new york lent hundreds of millions of dollars to the future president, right. so this is the second reason why it s very important to the american presidency right now if deutsche bank really did just get subpoenaed by the special counsel s office. there s the russian money laundering thing they re up to
on. billions of dollars in elicit russian money flowed through that office, started getting spirited out of russia through that deutsche bank moscow office and this multibillion dollars scheme they were operating. deutsche bank rab that scheme out of their moscow office using their offices in the west as well. but that whole thing happened, they did that because they could thanks apparently to their connections to the russian government and putin. they did it because they could. but deutsche bank also did it because they got paid, right? because they got a cut. you re moving multiple bills of illicit dollars, yeah, you re taking a cut. that moscow office of deutsche bank according to harding started clearing profits of a half billion to a billion dollars a year in profit. that one office.