Dusseldorf NRW-Landesbank WestLB has been history for eleven years. Devastating management failures contributed to its downfall. The institute was also involved in illegal cum-ex transactions. The Latin term describes stock group transactions around the distribution date with (“cum”) and without (“ex”) dividends. For more than ten years, investigations have been underway against banks and investors who have had capital gains tax paid only once reimbursed twice.
Despite overwhelming evidence, WestLB has denied for many years that it was involved in the business at all. Even when a whistleblower made insider information available to the tax investigators in 2015, WestLB’s successor, Portigon, denied having made cum-ex deals. Only when the public prosecutor’s office began investigations in spring 2016 was WestLB no longer able to deny its dealings at the expense of the general public.
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How massively WestLB had criminally enriched itself was shown when the tax office demanded back the capital gains tax that had been wrongly refunded. At the end of 2019, Portigon announced that possible tax liabilities from WestLB’s cum-ex transactions amounted to EUR 600 million. Including interest, the damage could amount to one billion euros.
Now the investigation is in full swing. They target a good two dozen men who were in charge of the deals or approved them. In the Handelsblatt Crime podcast, our investigative reporters Sönke Iwersen and Volker Votsmeier talk about this extraordinary case – and about a bank that shamelessly grabbed its own owners’ pockets.
Handelsblatt Crime appears every 14 days and can be heard wherever there are podcasts.
More: You can hear the previous episode of Handelsblatt Crime here.