SecondThe prosecutor’s office and the police will Federal Ministry of Justice Moved to Berlin. The documents were also confiscated. As announced by the public prosecutor in Osnabrück, Lower Saxony, the background of the operation was an investigation into the suspected evasion of punishment by the financial intelligence unit (FIU) of the customs office in charge of anti-money laundering activities. She has been investigating the case for a long time and has searched the Federal Customs Service.
Suspected of evading punishment
According to the prosecutor’s office, the Federal Customs Service obtained documents during the raid, which revealed information about “extensive communication” between FIU and the two federal ministries. The authorities said: “The purpose of today’s search is to further clarify the suspicion of criminal offences, especially personal responsibility.” The investigation was conducted “in all directions.”
According to the prosecutor’s office, the proceedings involved the suspicion that the financial intelligence agency failed to forward money laundering reports submitted by “millions” of banks to the police and judicial agencies. At the beginning of the investigation that has been ongoing since 2020, more than 1 million euros of suspicious payments have been made to Africa since 2018, which a bank believed may be related to arms and drug trafficking and terrorist financing. The Financial Intelligence Unit did not forward it, so it was not blocked.
As the Public Prosecutor’s Office announced on Thursday, it also hopes to investigate whether “management and personnel in charge of various ministries” “participated in the decision of FIU”. At the same time, their investigation also involved the question of “why the number of suspicious transaction reports dropped to a fraction after the financial intelligence agency took over the control of money laundering”. The evaluation of the documents will take several weeks.
A spokeswoman for the Berlin Ministry of Justice stated that her house is cooperating with investigators “to the maximum extent”. At the same time, she pointed out that the suspicion was not directed at employees of the ministry. FIU is a customs department under the Ministry of Finance. FIU is the central office for combating money laundering activities. It was originally located at the Federal Criminal Police Department. She didn’t transfer to customs until 2017.
