Deutsche Bank's role in questionable tax shelters - fire destroys bank and records - LMDC and it's interesting people

Subsequent to the recent interesting activities exposed of UBS bank this interesting article about interesting things is published in its entirity for those interested people interested in such interesting matters. Some emphasis has been (mis?) placed.

U.S. widens Deutsche Bank inquiry By Lynnley BrowningPublished: Thursday May 18th, 2006 International Herald Tribune

NEW YORK: A U.S. investigation of Deutsche Bank's role in questionable tax shelters has widened to include a broader array of shelters than previously known, according to people briefed on the inquiry.

The largest German bank has been under investigation as an outgrowth of the criminal inquiry into the accounting firm KPMG, but the investigation has recently widened to include the bank's links with other firms, and to include shelters not covered in the KPMG case, specifically shelters known as digital options. Digital options involve complex offsetting trades in foreign currency options to produce losses.

Deutsche Bank has been in talks with U.S. prosecutors in New York over its tax shelter work. In August, KPMG reached a $456 million deferred-prosecution agreement with prosecutors and admitted criminal wrongdoing over four types of shelters, some of them ones that Deutsche Bank worked on. A smaller German bank, HVB, has also settled with prosecutors. But Deutsche Bank's extensive role in the creation and sale of questionable tax shelters may complicate its negotiations.

Deutsche Bank declined to comment. The bank has said in the past that the transactions it arranged for tax shelters were regular and ordinary.

Prosecutors are examining how Deutsche Bank helped to make and sell a digital option shelter called Cobra to more than 1,100 wealthy investors around 1999 and 2000, according to the people who have been briefed on the inquiry. The prosecutors are also looking at the bank's similar role in making and selling a shelter similar to Cobra known as Homer, which was sold through Bank One, and at a related shelter called MLD, for market-linked deposit.

J.P. Morgan Chase, ( who snaffled up Bear Stearns) which acquired Bank One in 2004, declined to comment.

Many aggressive tax shelters look alike, and from the late 1990s through recent years different promoters had various names for their own shelters, although they were typically updated versions of existing shelters.

Cobra (currency options bring reward alternatives Ho.Ho.Ho.), Homer (hedge option monetization of economic remainder Ditto ) and MLD are all regarded by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service as variations of a widely used abusive tax-avoidance strategy known as Son of Boss. The IRS has never considered any Son of Boss shelter valid for deductions and had banned them by September 2000. Deutsche Bank has been accused in lawsuits of continuing to promote shelters that were variations of Son of Boss after that date.

Details about these shelters are outlined in internal documents that have emerged in civil litigation against Deutsche Bank brought by wealthy investors who bought the tax shelters.

David Deary, a lawyer in Dallas who has filed lawsuits against Deutsche Bank in U.S. District Court in Manhattan and in a Texas State court, among others, on behalf of wealthy investors who bought digital options shelters, said: "Deutsche Bank was the driving force behind every tax strategy that involved digital options. And without Deutsche Bank, none of these tax shelters could have been sold and implemented."

One internal document that has emerged is a PowerPoint presentation of Homer from October 2001 that outlines the steps Deutsche Bank and the law firms White & Case and Jenkens & Gilchrist took to put the shelter together for individual clients. The document, eight pages long, breaks down the shelter into nine stages, each containing multiple steps like "pretrade" document creation, "options to trust" and "partnership liquidation."

The document indicates that the core workings of Homer revolved around Deutsche Bank's arranging trades and loans that were intended to lose money. The tax agency considers such transactions to be a hallmark of an abusive tax shelter. The document also describes how Deutsche Bank transferred the losses between trusts and partnerships, to generate artificial losses. Over all, the document depicts, through a maze of boxes and arrows, how Deutsche Bank worked side by side with the law firms to carry out the shelter.

Amazing fire hits Deutsche Bank and their office records : No Amazing pictures

Reading this alongside another intersting news story is helpful to those intersted inthese interestingmatters go to link for rest ...

Just short of the sixth anniversary of the terrorist attacks which destroyed the World Trade Center, a seven-alarm fire raged through the half-demolished Deutsche Bank building at ground zero, killing two firefighters on August 18.

The building at 130 Liberty Street had been irreparably damaged when the south tower of the Trade Center collapsed into it on September 11, 2001. (but strangely enough for airplane resistant Manhattan Towers did not fall down like WTC 7) However, the building had stood shrouded in black netting for the past six years, oddly untouched by the cleanup and demolition efforts that had immediately gotten under way on the rest of ground zero.

Demolition of the contaminated building did not begin until February 2007, when in tandem with environmental regulators, workers finally began disassembling the 41-story building from the top down, using acetylene torches to slice though the steel beams and disassemble the structure. They had reached the 26th floor when the fire broke out. More see also appointing Bovis " Consultants to the corporation have confirmed that the tower has excessive levels of asbestos, dioxin, lead, silica, quartz, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, chromium and manganese."

On June 14th 2007 Mayor Bloomberg and then Governor Eliot Spitzer announced that JPMorgan Chase had won the bid to buy and build the new tower at 130 Liberty Street to replace the Deutsche Bank Building

Readers are also directed to learning more about the LMDC (Lower Manhattan development Corporation) set up to revive the city centre after 9/11 and their Directors. Intersting people such as John C Whitehead former Chairman of the Board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Director of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Harvard Board of Overseers, Haverford College, . He is presently Chairman of the Goldman Sachs Foundation .

Michael Balboni is Deputy Secretary for Public Safety and has day-to-day responsibility for managing homeland security affairs, emergency preparedness and response, and law enforcement. Prior to this appointment he was the Chair of the Senate Committee on Veterans, Homeland Security and Military Affairs. He was the author of the state's Anti-Terrorism Law of 2001 that mandates severe penalties for those who commit terror acts, make terror threats, or render assistance to terrorists. He also authored a 2002 law that helps protect the state's water supply from terror attacks. In 2005, he authored the Chemical Plant Security Act, the first of its kind in the nation. In 2004, Mr. Balboni was appointed to serve on a national task force reviewing allocation of federal money for homeland security measures. In 2005, he was named Senior Fellow at the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University.

Interesting people.

Also interesting is a news release from LMDC 30th April 2008 MILESTONE REACHED ON 130 LIBERTY STREET

The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) announced today that another milestone has been reached at 130 Liberty Street (see above) and that the final stages of work on the abatement and decontamination have commenced. Since the tragic fire of August 18, 2007, the LMDC has worked closely with federal, state and city agencies to enhance safety conditions for first responders, workers and residents and to make modifications to the plan for abating the building.

Facsinating and must read blog post from the time of the fire here Samskara-Mandala’s Weblog
"The recent fire of the Detusche Bank at the former site of The World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan, New York, might be cause for some re-examination of a myth that just won’t die. That is of the real reason for the destruction of the twin towers at what is now called Ground Zero. " etc ... etc ...