(Bloomberg) -- Nordea Bank Abp agreed to pay a $35 million fine in the US to end an investigation into the largest Nordic lender’s past anti-money laundering shortcomings.
The fine represents a final resolution into the probe by the New York State Department of Financial Services concerning the adequacy of Helsinki-based Nordea’s anti-money laundering safeguards in the 2008 to 2019 period, the lender said on Tuesday.
The development is the latest sequel to one of Europe’s largest dirty-money scandals from the last decade that’s linked to suspect flows from the former Soviet Union to the West through Nordic banks, and has implicated several regional heavyweights including Danske Bank A/S and Swedbank AB. Danske in 2022 agreed to pay $2 billion to end a probe in the US.
“The historical investigations by DFS concerned Nordea’s former processes, policies and controls to prevent money laundering and the former compliance framework, including those of the closed Vesterport International Branch in Denmark and Nordea’s former operations in the Baltics,” the bank said.
The US fine “has no material impact on the financial position of Nordea,” and the charge will be booked in the third quarter, the bank said. According to Nordea’s understanding, the resolution concludes DFS’s investigation, and the bank said it’s “not aware of any other pending or active investigation by US authorities related to such historical financial crime prevention matters.”
Nordea’s shares were little changed on the news, and closed 0.6% higher in Helsinki.
According to Nordea, the case is separate from the charges Danish police filed in July following a long investigation into the lender’s anti-money laundering controls in the 2012 to 2015 period.
In that case — Denmark’s biggest to date according to the country’s National Special Crime Unit — about 26 billion Danish kroner ($3.9 billion) of transactions are under scrutiny. The bank faces an estimated maximum fine of 6.5 billion kroner, if found guilty, according to some legal experts. Nordea has said it doesn’t agree with the legal assessment concluded by the Danish authorities.
--With assistance from Christian Wienberg and Sanne Wass.
(Updates shares in sixth, claries Nordea comment in seventh paragraph)
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