Val Broeksmit

Valentin "Val" Broeksmit (January 14, 1976 – April 25, 2022) was a whistleblower and FBI informant who exposed financial irregularities at Deutsche Bank. After his adoptive father, a senior Deutsche Bank executive, died by suicide in 2014, Broeksmit discovered thousands of confidential bank documents in his father's email account. He subsequently shared these records with journalists and federal investigators, contributing to coverage of the bank's involvement in money laundering and its financial relationships with Donald Trump.

Early life Broeksmit was born in Ukraine in 1976 and emigrated to Chicago in 1979 with his parents, Alla and Alexander. After his parents divorced, he spent time in a foster home in Cook County. When he was nine, his life changed significantly when Alla met and married William S. Broeksmit, a risk specialist who would go on to become a senior executive at Deutsche Bank. The family relocated to New Jersey, where Val grew up with access to his stepfather's world of high finance.

Discovery of the Deutsche Bank documents William S Broeksmit In January 2014, William S. Broeksmit committed suicide. He had been hired by Edson Mitchell in the 1990s to spearhead Deutsche Bank's expansion into international investments and money management, and had grown very close to bank co-CEO Anshu Jain.

While going through his late father's email account, Val Broeksmit discovered a vast archive of internal bank records, including minutes of board meetings, spreadsheets, and financial plans from the New York branch of Deutsche Bank Trust Company Americas (DBTCA). He began sharing these documents with journalists at Welt am Sonntag and ZDF, whose reporting revealed numerous irregularities. These included a $10 billion money laundering scheme run through Deutsche Bank's Moscow branch—for which the New York State Department of Financial Services later fined the bank $425 million—as well as derivatives improprieties.

Cooperation with investigators In January 2017, Glenn R. Simpson of Fusion GPS paid Broeksmit for copies of his documents.

By early 2022, Broeksmit had resurfaced but faced new legal troubles. He was arrested for carrying a privately made firearm, and in April 2022, employees of The Brewery Art Colony filed for a restraining order against him, alleging he had threatened them with a homemade firearm as part of "a continuing pattern of unlawful and harassing conduct occurring over a significant period".

Later that month, Broeksmit was found dead on the campus of Wilson High School in El Sereno. The coroner stated the cause of death as accidental, resulting from blunt force trauma to his torso, having fallen from a tree.