Published 6 January 2022 at 07.13
Economics. When US authorities asked questions about Swedbank's links to the scandal-ridden law and money & shy & laundering agency Mossack Fonseca, the rule & shy; after & shy; life & shy; manager Cecilia Hernqvist deliberately chose to delimit the answer so that the Baltic subsidiaries' links were not included. <. br /> & nbsp; “That's why I wanted to remove them in the [delimitation] :)”, Hernqvist wrote when an employee pointed out that the subsidiaries had many connections to Mossack Fonseca.
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The information comes from emails included in the preliminary investigation against Swedbank's now accused ex-CEO Birgitte Bonnesen.
The email shows that Swedbank chose not to report the Baltic subsidiary Swedbank AS's links to Mossack Fonseca after receiving a request from US authorities. The reason was that Swedbank's executives knew that the Baltic subsidiaries had troublesome connections to money laundering, which they did not want to inform the American authorities about. The information was first published in an article in Dagens industri.
Hernqvist was previously Swedbank's General Counsel, but at the time she was head of the bank's compliance. Today, she has left the bank, after SVT recently revealed her responsibility for the blackout with reference to internal sources. However, it is only now that the information has become completely public by making the preliminary investigation against the former CEO Birgitte Bonnesen public.
The preliminary investigation includes emails about a request from the US Department of Financial Services (DFS) in New York on 21 February 2018. The authority asked Swedbank to report all transactions related to Mossack Fonseca, which was at the center of the so-called Panama leak. 2016.
Swedbank reported on its customers in connection with Mossack Fonseca in Sweden and Norway and stated that none of them involved any suspected money laundering. Customers in the Baltics, on the other hand, were left out following a decision by Cecilia Hernqvist.
According to Dagens industri, DFS had requested to find out the connections to Mossack Fonseca that were with all the bank's customers and the authority clarified in particular that the question concerned “Swedbank's global operations and is not limited to the branch in New York”. Hernqvist still pretended, however, that the issue could be interpreted as being delimited so that Swedbank's subsidiaries in the Baltics were not covered.
“I perceive that it is only Swedbank AB with branches”, she wrote in an internal email.
When one of Swedbank's money laundering experts explained to Hernqvist that the bank had many customers connected to Mossack Fonseca in its Baltic operations, she expressed herself more clearly:
“That is why I wanted to remove them in [the delimitation] 🙂 “, she wrote.
A federal criminal investigation against Swedbank's executives is currently underway in the United States due to the money laundering scandal in the Baltics. Swedbank has a branch in New York and in the American view, the bank and its managers are thus possible to sue in a US court. The investigation is being led by the U.S. Department of Justice, the FBI and the Federal Bureau of Investigation in New York's Southern District, according to Dagens Industri.