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The Swedish Financial Court has received documents attesting that the first Scandinavian bank has not complied with its obligations to combat money laundering. The case could be about a hundred million dollars.
After Danske Bank, it is the turn of another Nordic bank, Nordea, to be suspected of laundering dirty money from Russia. The Swedish Finance Ministry said in a statement that it had received a complaint against the biggest Scandinavian bank for fraud, forgery and money laundering. At the root of these charges was Hermitage Capital Management fund manager Bill Browder, who also played a key role in the revelations of the Danske Bank case. The US CEO says he spotted 365 accounts in Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway, where 175 million dollars (151 million euros) would have passed through to launder dirty money, between 2007 and 2013. Swedish authorities have not yet opened an investigation.

“The next step will be to appoint a prosecutor […] and then decide whether a preliminary investigation should be opened or not,” said the Swedish regulator.

Bill Browder told the Swedish daily Dagens Industri that the suspicions against the Nordic bank, which has just moved its headquarters from Stockholm to Helsinki, Finland (and therefore in the euro zone), would be only “the submerged part of the iceberg . Former client of Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in 2009 in a Russian prison under suspicious conditions, Bill Browder explained he wanted to “open procedures for money laundering in the West” because it was impossible to “sue anyone for the murder [of Magnitsky] in Russia “.

Suspicious transactions reported
In a statement to Reuters, the bank, which has some 10 million customers, said it already knew about the suspicions of Hermitage Capital Management fund money laundering practices, also ensuring he reported to the authorities all suspicious transactions .

“We are aware of this report and at Nordea, we are working closely with the relevant authorities in the countries where we are present,” wrote Nordea in this press release to Reuters.

In an interview with Bloomberg earlier this month, Julie Galbo, responsible g ement and risk management at Nordea, was on his side said it could not rule out that the bank had been used to launder money.

This new revelation comes as Danske Bank is embroiled in a massive money-laundering scandal that forced its managing director, Thomas Borgen, to resign. An independent investigation had revealed that the Estonian subsidiary of the Danish establishment had seen more than 200 billion euros , most of them suspicious, being transferred between 2007 and 2015, from the accounts of 15,000 foreign customers. According to the Financial Times , the first Danish bank was fined up to 7 billion euros.
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