Bank shares have retreated on the stock exchanges today after new money laundering revelations.
Peter Utterström, lawyer and expert on international money laundering legislation, is not surprised by the exchange rate reactions.
– It is probably a reasonable reaction. Especially from a longer perspective. This will result in the need to take more checks and have more employees who control transfers and payments, and that will strain the result, he says.
The leaked American Government documents obtained by the news site Buzzfeed show a pattern in which large international banks have failed in their work against money laundering. In total, these are suspicious transactions worth SEK 17,000 billion between the years 2000 and 2017, and the banks that have been singled out include British HSBC, German Deutsche bank and Danish Danske bank.
Nordea, which is now considered a Finnish bank, is also singled out. According to Finnish Yle, so-called “suspicious” transactions totaling SEK 1.5 billion have passed through the bank, which, among other things, has not been able to show who was behind the accounts that have been used.
According to SVT, which is included in the journalist network ICIJ, which has reviewed the material, there are also Swedish links that have not yet been published.
Åsa Thalén is head of the department responsible for money laundering at Finansinspektionen. She says that Finansinspektionen will discuss the information that has emerged with the agency’s counterparts in the rest of the Nordic region in the existing co-operation forum.
– This is typical information that is discussed in the Board of Supervisors. But exactly what we do with the information is too early for us to comment, we need to look more at what this is for something. Then we will see how we take it further and what it means for our supervision, she says.
Nordea writes in a written comment that the bank does not accept to be used as a platform for money laundering, and that if it discovers anything deviating, it is investigated and reported to the authorities.
Source: ICELAND NEWS