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German prosecutors charged two former board members of Greensill Bank AG for their roles in the 2021 demise of the lender.

The men are charged with bankruptcy crimes and false accounting, a spokesman for Bremen prosecutors said in an emailed statement. A member of the unit’s supervisory board was also indicted. The statement didn’t identify any of the accused.

The probe in Germany is just one of a number of court claims and investigations sparked by the collapse of Greensill’s trade financing business. The firm, with the backing of SoftBank Group Corp. and General Atlantic, went from a small startup to a tech unicorn with an estimated $7 billion valuation at one point. David Cameron, the former UK prime minister, was an adviser to the firm and faced criticism for his well-paid role at the company.

The two German board members allegedly caused the insolvency of Greensill Bank by breaching banking regulations during the 2019 refinancing of Sanjeev Gupta’s network of companies’ €2.18 billion ($2.55 billion) acquisition of steel mills, according to the Bremen prosecutors’ statement.

Greensill Bank was an important part of the wider group, pulling in funds from savers by offering some of the best deposit rates in the country in an era of ultra low rates. At one point, more than half the loans on Greensill Bank’s books were linked to Gupta’s companies.

The executives also allegedly concealed the credit business in trading books and financial statements by making it appear to be a low-risk purchase of claims. The German probe at some point targeted 14 suspects but in the end, only three were indicted.

In the UK, officers at the Serious Fraud Office have been investigating suspected fraud, fraudulent trading and money laundering in relation to the financing and conduct of companies within Gupta’s loose network of businesses since 2021. The UK government took control of Gupta’s large steelworks in northern England in August. A GFG spokesman declined to comment.

Lex Greensill himself is fighting moves by the UK government to have him disqualified as a director, while his firm’s own administrators filed a civil case against him in April.

Photograph: A logo outside the Greensill Bank AG offices in Bremen, Germany, in 2021. Photo credit: Dominik Reipka/Bloomberg

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