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Deutsche Bank and the terror money trail

By CNN's Allan Dodds Frank

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Investigators trying to follow the trail of terrorist finances are finding small transactions can easily disappear in the vast tide of money that moves through the world's banks every day.

Of 200 accounts frozen by German banking authorities and linked to terrorists, 10 were at Deutsche Bank, Europe's biggest bank.

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Cracking down on terrorists' finances, Allan Dodds Frank reports

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CEO Rolf Breuer says the accounts held less than $1 million, a tiny number for a bank with nearly $875 billion in assets.

His bank says it is cooperating with investigations but is not commenting further.

Deutsche Bank alone has more than 1,400 offices in Germany and nearly 900 in more than 70 other countries, including a large office on Liberty Street that was badly damaged when the World Trade Center collapsed.

Keeping track on the cash flows is a problem, according to Raymond Baker of the Center for International Policy.

"When we have a trillion dollars a year, my estimate of the combination of different forms of dirty money that flows into western coffers, it becomes extremely difficult to ferret out those narrow parts of the problem that you want to stop, those parts that are criminal or terrorist in nature," he said.

Dan Karson, from financial security company Kroll International, says investigators need to focus on small account holders.

"If somebody who is bent on terror parks money through the use of fairly anonymous individuals, who have a history in a community, who have a job and who open an account with a small amount of money and keep it reasonably active, it is virtually impossible for a banking institution to really understand that an account may be used for an unlawful transaction of some kind."



 
 
 
 


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RELATED SITES:
• Deutsche Bank - Corporate and Investment Banking
• Kroll International
• Center for International Policy

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