Pomerantz Appointed Lead Counsel in Deutsche Bank AG Securities Litigation
On December 28, 2020, U.S. District Judge Kevin McNulty of the District of New Jersey appointed Pomerantz LLP as Lead Counsel on behalf of Lead Plaintiff Yun Wang in Karimi v. Deutsche Bank AG, 20-cv-8978 (D.N.J.), a securities litigation being pursued on behalf of a class of defrauded investors concerning allegations regarding Deutsche Bank AG’s (“Deutsche Bank” or the “Company”) failure to adequately report deficiencies in its anti-money laundering controls.
Deutsche Bank is a multinational investment bank and financial services company. The company is incorporated and headquartered in Frankfurt, Germany and its shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “DB.”
The complaint alleges that, from November 7, 2017 until July 6, 2020, Deutsche Bank failed to disclose that: (i) the Company had failed to remediate deficiencies related to its anti-money laundering (“AML”) compliance, its disclosure controls, procedures and internal control over financial reporting; (ii) as a result, Deutsche Bank failed to properly monitor customers it deemed to be high risk, including convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein (“Epstein”) and two correspondent banks, Danske Estonia (“Danske”) and FBME Bank (“FBME”), both the subjects of prior scandals involving financial misconduct; and (iii) once the foregoing was revealed, it was foreseeably likely to have a material negative impact on Deutsche Bank's financial results and reputation.
On May 13, 2020, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, a German newspaper, reported that the U.S. Federal Reserve had sharply criticized Deutsche Bank’s U.S. operations in an internal audit, “expressing continued dissatisfaction” with Deutsche Bank’s AML controls and liquidity management, issues which had been identified through “investigations in late 2019 and early 2020” but never remediated. On this news, Deutsche Bank’s shares fell $0.31 per share, or 4.48%, to close at $6.60 per share on May 13, 2020.
On July 7, 2020, Law360, a news source for legal professionals, reported that New York State’s Department of Financial Services had fined Deutsche Bank $150 million for “failing to appropriately manage its dealings with alleged bad actors including millionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein” as it “processed hundreds of transactions totaling millions of dollars" without flagging numerous questionable transactions from accounts associated with Epstein, Danske and FBME. On this news, Deutsche Bank’s shares fell $0.13 per share, or 1.3%, to close at $9.82 per share on July 7, 2020.