“Cocaine trafficking and the associated money laundering in Germany can only function on a large scale through corruption of public officials and other facilitators. But the focus of investigators is only on the perpetrators within the criminal networks,” said Robin Hofmann, a specialist in organised crime at Maastricht University. Instead, Hofmann said, as has been done in the Netherlands, the search for the infiltration of cocaine money must be widened further “to the facilitators, the lawyers, local politicians and financial advisers who enable organised crime and profit from it”.

Germany is still a haven for money laundering. Other European countries accuse Germany of deliberately staying inactive in order to make tax money off of it. Until 2023 it was still legal to buy properties in cash.