By Liam Vaughan, Jake Rudnitsky, and Ambereen Choudhury
Mastermind or scapegoat, Tim
Wiswell was at the heart of the bank’s $10 billion mirror-trade scandal.
Just off the Connecticut
shoreline where he grew up, Tim Wiswell leaned forward in the cockpit of his
sleek, all-white 50-foot yacht. It was Aug. 9, 2015, and, dressed in shorts, a
polo shirt, and mirrored shades, his hair tousled by the breeze, the 36-year-old
was a picture of health and happiness. Natalia, the Russian artist he’d married
five years earlier, lay by his side. Their two small children played nearby.
Nothing in the scene, captured
in photographs uploaded to Facebook, hinted at the turmoil surrounding Wiswell,
the clean-cut trader at the center of Deutsche Bank AG’s $10 billion Russian
scandal. Four months earlier he’d been summoned into a roomful of lawyers and
told he was being suspended from his job as head of equities for Deutsche Bank in
Moscow. An internal investigation dubbed Project Square had determined
Wiswell’s desk helped Russians divert billions of dollars out of the country
using transactions known as mirror trades.
Now, the U.S. Justice Department and
the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority are investigating whether trades that
flowed through Wiswell’s desk violated anti-money-laundering rules, according
to people with knowledge of the matter. Wiswell hasn’t been charged, and both
agencies declined to comment.
Deutsche Bank has said it
could face penalties relating to the Russian debacle by the end of the year.
The timing couldn’t be worse. Shares in the bank slumped last week to their
lowest level in two decades following reports the Frankfurt-based lender faces
as much as $14 billion in fines to resolve a separate U.S. probe into the sale
of mortgage-backed securities—more than twice the amount it has set aside for
all litigation. The bank said it has no intention of paying anything close to
that sum, while Chief Executive Officer John Cryan has rebuffed suggestions it
might seek fresh capital from investors or require a state rescue.
The fallout from Project
Square was precipitous. In June 2015, weeks after news reports of events on
Wiswell’s desk surfaced, Cryan’s predecessors Anshu Jain and Juergen Fitschen
announced they’d be stepping down, their positions made untenable by a list of
scandals that also included probes into rigging interest rates and foreign
exchange. In Russia, Deutsche Bank adopted the nuclear option and shut its
Moscow investment bank. A trading floor that once employed 200 people and
generated about $500 million a year in revenue is dark.
It’s a tragic end to a
once-glittering jewel in Deutsche Bank’s fading empire. Wiswell, meanwhile, has
hunkered down with his family on a surfers’ beach in Indonesia as he comes to
terms with his own personal tragedy. Once touted as a rising star, he’s now
being blamed for the destruction of the investment bank in Russia. He didn’t
respond to calls, messages sent via social media or requests for comment made
through his lawyer, Ekaterina Dukhina.
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