The public prosecutor's office and the police went out on Thursday to raid the federal finance and justice ministries in Berlin.
Documents were also confiscated.
The background to the action is an investigation into the suspicion of avoidance of punishment in the office against those responsible for the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) for combating money laundering, which is located at customs, as the public prosecutor in Osnabrück in Lower Saxony announced.
She has been investigating the case for a long time and has already searched the Federal Customs Administration.
Alleged penalty avoidance
According to the public prosecutor's office, documents had been secured during the raids in the Federal Customs Administration, which revealed information about "extensive communication" between the FIU and the two federal ministries. "The aim of today's searches is to further clarify the suspicion of a criminal offense and, in particular, individual responsibilities," said the authority. The investigations ran "in all directions".
According to the public prosecutor's office, the proceedings are concerned with the suspicion that the FIU did not forward money laundering reports filed by banks "in the millions" to the police and the judiciary. At the beginning of the investigation, which has been ongoing since 2020, there was a suspicious payment of more than one million euros to Africa from 2018, in which a bank saw a possible connection to arms and drug trafficking as well as terrorist financing. The FIU did not forward it, so it was not prevented.
As the public prosecutor's office announced on Thursday, it also wants to investigate whether “the management and those responsible for the ministries” were “involved in the decisions of the FIU”. At the same time, their investigations also deal with the question "why the number of suspicious transaction reports has fallen to a fraction since the FIU took over the money laundering control". The evaluation of the documents will take several weeks.
A spokeswoman for the Ministry of Justice in Berlin stated that her house was cooperating "to the fullest extent" with the investigators. At the same time, she pointed out that the suspicion was not directed against employees of the ministry. The FIU is a department of customs that is attached to the Ministry of Finance. The FIU acts as the central office for combating money laundering. It was initially located at the Federal Criminal Police Office. She only switched to customs in 2017.