
Inside Danske Bank's 200B euro 'dirty money' scandal - the_rosentotter
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/03/inside-danske-banks-200-billion-euro-dirty-money-scandal.html
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the_rosentotter
_Toward the end of 2013, an internal email changed everything. Entitled
"Whistleblowing disclosure — knowingly dealing with criminals in Estonia
branch", it was written by Howard Wilkinson, Danske's head of markets in
Estonia. Its content was explosive. Detailing a "near total process failure",
he referred to a UK limited liability partnership called Lantana Trade which
had opened an account at Danske in Estonia the previous year._

 _Its account was marked "dormant" at UK Companies House and yet it had a
credit balance at Danske of $965,418 on the same date. A colleague later told
Mr. Wilkinson that the bank did not know who the beneficial owners were but
"apparently it was discovered that they included the family of Vladimir Putin,
Russia's president, and the FSB [Russia's intelligence service]", according to
the email seen by the FT._

 _Danske 's internal audit team was sent to investigate the Estonia operation
in January 2014. Yet Mr. Wilkinson complained in a further email in April that
despite his warnings "no related client account has been closed by management"
and "there appears to have been no attempt by management to identify the full
scope of the problem of UK LLPs submitting false accounts"._

 _He reported that a senior executive told him "[Danske Bank] is not the
police" and "[Danske Bank] has no obligation to report false client accounts
to the authorities." That same day, he resigned and sent an email to
Copenhagen, signing off: "Sad to say, it seems to me that things are totally
broken here."_

Wow. So internal whistleblowing procedures are token efforts which are
actually shortcuts to get yourself 'resigned'. I become less and less
surprised when reality turns out to match Dilbert one-to-one. Which is sad.

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the_rosentotter
Another tidbit:

 _Questions have also been asked as to whether Danske received special
treatment from its regulator, which was until May headed by the bank 's former
chief financial officer._

I.e. the body that had sole responsibility to enforce anti-money laundering on
the bank was its former CFO. SMH...

