Nordea Bank Under Investigation For Possible Money Laundering

Nordea Bank’s Danish headquarters was raided and searched by the country’s state prosecutor for potential ties to illegal money laundering, according to a report in Reuters.

The bank has been under investigation since 2016, and it took a 95 million euro provision in April for a potential fine related to the crime.

The prosecutor took documents, both paper copies and digital, and also emails, on June 12. After news of the raid went public, shares in the bank fell about 2 percent.

Nordea said in a statement that the search was about “the combat of money laundering in relation to past customers in the International Branch.”

The head of Nordea in Denmark, Frank Vang-Jensen, said: “We fully cooperate with the prosecutors to ensure that they have access to all relevant information.”

In March, Nordea was accused of handling millions of dollars in suspicious transactions for several years.

According to a report in Reuters, citing Finnish broadcaster Yle, which had access to leaked documents, the money came from companies registered in countries with tax havens, including the British Virgin Islands, Panama and Belize. The bank reportedly handled 700 million euros or $790 million in transactions that were questionable from 2005 to 2017.

Yle is part of a group of media companies that joined forces to look into money laundering in the Baltics tied to Russia. It’s not clear from the report if Nordea faces any ties to the money-laundering scandal in Estonia that has ensnared rivals Swedbank and Danske Bank, news outlet said at the time. Nordea, according to the report, had no immediate comment when the allegations were reported by Yle in an online story and ran in Danish newspaper Berlingske, which is part of the media group investigating money laundering.

“These are all issues that we have seen and commented on before and are therefore in line with previous statements made on AML [anti-money laundering] issues,” it told Reuters ahead of the full report’s release.