Estonia’s prosecutors indicted six former employees of Danske Bank A/S’s local branch for taking part in one of Europe’s biggest money laundering scams.
(Bloomberg) — Estonia’s prosecutors indicted six former employees of Danske Bank A/S’s local branch for taking part in one of Europe’s biggest money laundering scams.
The people were accused of “large-scale money laundering,” involving at least $1.6 billion and €6 million ($6.6m), the prosecutor general’s office said in a statement on Monday. While it identified the persons only by their first names — Juri, Erik, Jevgeni, Mihhail, Marko, and Natalja — it had said last year the six it intended to charge were ex-workers at the bank.
One of the indicted, Mihhail Murnikov, denies any wrongdoing, his lawyer Martin Hirvoja said by phone. Hirvoja said prosecutors had declined his request to interrogate workers at the bank’s head office in Copenhagen where “a series of people” were directly connected to the Estonian unit’s activities.
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The Estonian charges mark the latest in a long string of legal proceedings in multiple countries after claims of massive money laundering activities at Danske between 2007 and 2015 came to light in 2018. Denmark’s largest lender said then that a large chunk of 200 billion euros in transactions at its Estonian branch were suspicious, shocking the Nordic nation and investors and eventually leading to the ouster of most of the bank’s top management and a slump in its shares.
Danske’s shares declined following the news, closing 1% lower at 146.6 kroner on Monday.
The bank in December admitted to fraud and agreed to pay $2 billion to end a long-running US probe into the case. It pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit bank fraud and admitted providing banking services to suspicious customers — including in Russia, despite knowing of the money laundering risks, the US Justice Department said then.
The Estonian charges involve at least eight offenses associated with Russia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Switzerland, the USA and Iran, the office said.
“The charges state that customers were sold bodies corporate that concealed their actual owners; advice was offered on how to conceal the electronic trail left when making transactions; a service of preparing transaction documents was offered,” the statement added.
(Updates with lawyer’s comment, market reaction.)
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