China’s embassy in Spain has issued a statement expressing concern over the raid of the Madrid offices of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) by Spanish police, who arrested five of the bank’s directors as part of a probe into suspected money-laundering. The bank is suspected of allowing funds earned through the alleged crimes of smuggling, tax fraud and labour exploitation to be transferred “to China in a way that appeared legal”, police said in a statement. The EU police agency Europol, which supported Spanish authorities in their investigation, announced the five arrests in a separate statement. Armed police guarded the entrance of the branch located on the leafy Paseo de Recoletos, a wide boulevard in the centre of Madrid, on Wednesday. Suspects were led away in black hoods. The embassy’s statement on Wednesday said the Chinese government “always demands that the offices of accredited Chinese companies working abroad strictly abide by the laws, both of China and the country they were working in.” The embassy said that according to the information it currently possesses, “these offices in Spain have acted according to these demands,” and added that it had not received any information about the operation “from any official department in Spain”. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei on Thursday said Beijing hoped Spain would handle the matter “legally and fairly, protect the lawful rights of Chinese companies and their employees, and earnestly safeguard Sino-Spain relations”. The raid was a follow-up to an operation carried out last year that targeted Chinese gangs based in Spain, suspected of importing huge amounts of goods from China without declaring them on customs forms, to avoid import and tax duties. That operation involved more than 65 raids in Barcelona, Madrid and Valencia and led to over 30 arrests and the breakup of several illegal sweatshops where Chinese immigrants worked. The crime groups allegedly deposited their money with ICBC, which is accused of sending the funds to China without checking their origin as required by law. One of the crime groups that was broken up last year is suspected of having laundered “an amount known to be as of the moment 40 million euros” in the branch, the police statement said. Europol said Spanish investigators then uncovered other Chinese and Spanish crime groups that are suspected of also using the services of ICBC in Spain to launder money earned through illegal activities. The agency said it deployed a unit to Madrid to assist Spanish authorities with intelligence which found signs that the alleged money laundering had links to activities in France, Germany and Lithuania. The head of Europol’s financial intelligence group, Igor Angelini, said the operation “shows all the challenges that modern transnational financial investigations entail.” “Criminal activities generate cash which is then injected into the financial system through the misuse of complex corporate structures. The complicity of several professionals who move the funds across different jurisdictions completes the picture,” he added. Economy Minister Luis de Guindos said the government and Spain’s money laundering watchdog, SEPBLAC, would do all it could to help the investigation into ICBC. “If there is any type of need of cooperation with judicial or police authorities, we will provide it, as we always do and as and as SEPBLAC always does,” he said when asked about the search of ICBC. A police statement said a judge in Parla, a southern Madrid suburb where many Chinese store wholesalers are located, had ordered the search of the branch. ICBC is the world’s largest bank by market capitalisation. It entered the Spanish market in January 2011 with the inauguration of its branch in Madrid. A year later it opened a second branch in Barcelona. The Chinese lender’s foreign operations accounted for about 10 per cent of its total assets at the end of last year. Just over 191,000 Chinese nationals legally live in Spain, making the Chinese immigrant population the fourth largest foreign community in the country, according to national statistics institute INE. Xinhua and Agence France-Presse