The trail of money is lost in the branches of two Munich banks. The Italian businessman Maurizio Rullo regularly withdrew large sums of money from company accounts at the Stadtsparkasse and the HypoVereinsbank. On some days, he and his business partners took 900,000 euros at once. In what denomination is not known; in 100 euro bills, it would be a briefcase full of money. Within three and a half years, Rullo and his partners left the Munich banks with 68.9 million euros. Where they went with it and what they did with it, the investigators can not understand.

David Klaubert

Editor in the "Germany and the World" department.

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Officially, Rullo traded in scrap metal. His company TM Commodities, based in downtown Munich, not far from the Viktualienmarkt, bought tons of scrap metal in Slovenia. Dozens of trucks full drove to a warehouse in Eglharting, Upper Bavaria, every month. At least that's what it said in shipping documents. Neighbors there say, "Never seen it."

In mid-February, police arrested Maurizio Rullo and a dozen suspected accomplices. Italian and German investigators assume that they had built up a whole network of front companies, from Croatia to Bulgaria, Hungary to Italy and Germany. TM Commodities therefore only traded scrap on paper. The millions that flowed through their accounts, however, were genuine. Rullo had carefully chosen Munich as the company's headquarters, as shown by joint research by "Report München", the ARD studio in Rome, MDR and the F.A.Z. The great advantage of the location is that, unlike in most European countries, there are virtually no restrictions on the handling of cash in Germany. And hardly any controls.

The German investigators only came to Rullo's trail via detours. In 2019, the Federal Criminal Police Office evaluated the "Paradise Papers", a leak containing millions of documents from tax havens. They came across two holdings in Malta. One of the owners also had companies in Munich and, the BKA officials learned from their Italian colleagues, he was suspected of having links to the 'ndrangheta, the Calabrian mafia. They analyzed the company's accounts and discovered suspicious remittances that eventually led them to TM Commodities and the web around it.

In Italy, Rullo would not have been able to get his hands on the cash

When the investigators saw that millions of euros had been withdrawn from the accounts, they were surprised. In most cases, money laundering works the other way around: cash from criminal transactions, such as drug trafficking, is smuggled into the legal economic cycle via restaurants, car showrooms or real estate transactions. The illegal origin is thus disguised. Rullo and his accomplices, it is suspected, did the opposite: they took the money, which was already clean on paper due to the bogus transactions with the scrap, and made it disappear.

Under the code name "Black Steel", the police in Milan also investigated Rullo. The Environmental Crime Unit intercepted conversations, observed suspects and hid surveillance cameras in front of a plant for processing scrap metal. In Italy, Rullo actually traded in scrap metal. He bought up what he could get on the black market: car parts, copper cables, industrial and construction scrap. He then sold the material, which was legally considered garbage, to foundries and steel mills at a great profit – as processed scrap metal. Thanks to the surveillance cameras at his plant, however, the investigators saw that although thousands of tons of metal waste were processed there, according to the business documents, i.e. freed from pollutants, hardly any trucks drove up. Rullo apparently only re-declared the scrap.