House finance committee wants info from Deutsche Bank on Trump loans and Russia ‘mirror trades’

Ranking member Maxine Waters, D-Calif., participates in the House Financial Services Committee meeting to organize for the 115th Congress on Thursday, Feb. 2, 2017.

Ranking member Maxine Waters authored the letter.

Democrats on the House Committee on Financial Services have sent a letter to Deutsche Bank CEO John Cryan asking for information on the banks dealing with President Donald Trump.

Representative Maxine Waters of California and four other Democrats on the committee sent a letter dated May 23 to Deutsche Bank CEO John Cryan, asking the German bank to disclose “information relating to two internal reviews reportedly conducted by Deutsche Bank.”

In the letter, seen by Business Insider, the Congressional committee asks for information “regarding its 2011 Russian mirror trading scandal and the other regarding its review of the personal accounts of President Donald Trump and his family members held at the Bank.”

Deutsche Bank in January agreed to pay $628 million to UK and US regulators to settle probes into whether it helped covertly move as much as $10 billion out of Russia through a process known as “mirror trading.”

Separately, the Guardian reported in February that Deutsche Bank had lent $300 million to Trump and had carried out an internal review of the loans following his election to see if there was any connection to Russia. The result of the probe has not been publicly disclosed.

The committee says in its letter: “There is no transparency regarding who participated in, or benefited from, the Russian mirror trading scheme that allowed $10 billion to flow out of Russia. Likewise, Congress remains in the dark on whether loans Deutsche Bank made to President Trump were guaranteed by the Russian Government, or were in any way connected to Russia.

“Only with full disclosure can the American public determine the extent of the President’s financial ties to Russia and any impact such ties may have on his policy decisions,” the letter says.

A spokesperson for Deutsche Bank declined to comment.

Despite the strong wording of the letter, the Congressional democrats have no power to force Deutsche Bank to disclose any information as they are a minority in the house. The same group of Democrats called for an inquiry into the Department of Justice’s investigation of the Deutsche Bank mirror trading scandal in March but nothing has yet happened.