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The former chief executive of Swedbank has been charged with fraud and market manipulation, becoming the highest-ranking Swedish banker to be drawn into a sprawling money-laundering scandal in the Baltics. Birgitte Bonnesen had repeatedly spread misleading information suggesting Swedbank did not have any money-laundering problems in its Estonian operations, Thomas Langrot, chief prosecutor at Sweden’s Economic Crime Authority, said on Tuesday. Bonnesen was in charge of Sweden’s oldest bank from 2016 until she was fired by its board in 2019. She previously headed its Baltic business.
Swedbank and Denmark’s largest lender Danske Bank are both still under criminal and civil investigation by US authorities for money-laundering scandals in which hundreds of billions of euros of high-risk payments flowed through their branches in the Baltics. An official report by law firm Clifford Chance, commissioned by Swedbank, found that the bank had carried out €37bn of transactions with a high risk for money laundering between 2014 and 2019. An internal Swedbank report, seen by public broadcaster SVT, found about €80bn of money flowed through the non-resident client business of the bank in the Baltics from 2008 until 2013, most of it from Russia and other ex-Soviet states. Swedbank cancelled Bonnesen’s severance pay in March 2020 after the Clifford Chance report judged that statements she made in late 2018 and early 2019 as the scandal was developing were “inaccurate or presented without sufficient context”.
But it decided not to pursue any legal case of its own against Bonnesen or her predecessor Michael Wolf, who was in charge from 2009 until 2016. Bonnesen told journalists in October 2018 that a confidential internal report into Swedbank’s dealings with Danske — then under the spotlight for its own €200bn money-laundering scandal — contained “nothing” in the way of warning signs. “Now we have gone through everything and we have finished this review, because there is nothing,” she said, according to a transcript of the meeting. “I know that it is very boring, because I have the feeling that you think it is difficult that we don’t have anything.
But, you know, we have gone through all the names that you have seen in the media and in the Danske report — none of them have been customers in Swedbank.” Langrot said there was evidence of a “cover-up” to try to stop Swedbank’s money-laundering problems from coming out. A lawyer for Bonnesen did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday. In February, he told Swedish newspaper Dagens Industri that Bonnesen had committed no crime but merely answered questions truthfully from the media.
