German authorities have impounded $1.36 million (€1.195 million) from an account at a bank in Latvia, along with €50 million in real estate, as part of their probe into the Russian Laundromat scandal.

The bank account - which the Germans accessed presumably through a request for legal assistance - reportedly held money from the sale of a property in Chemnitz (formerly Karl-Marx-Stadt). The authorities are not releasing the name of the bank. There are three defendants.

The Global/Russian Laundromat, a scam that Russian criminals ran with the apparent approval of the Russian Government, ceased to operate in 2014 and investigations have continued ever since. The German investigation is three years old.

The 'laundromat' was, according to Germany's senior public prosecutor, formed by a former executive of AS Trasta Komercbanka, which was "cleared by Latvia's banking regulators in 2016." The regulators subsequently decided to shut the Riga-based bank down.

This time last year, in a bid to claw back some credibility, Latvia decided to eliminate deposits in US dollars, crack down on dealings with shell companies and set limits on the number of non-resident depositors that banks can serve, according to the news service France24.