How One Stubborn Banker Exposed a $200 Billion Russian Money-Laundering Scandal

[fleur-de-lisa]

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-one-stubborn-banker-exposed-a-200-billion-russian-money-laundering-scandal-1540307327

TALLINN, Estonia—It took a £1 payment to uncover one of the world’s biggest money-laundering scandals. Howard Wilkinson, a British trader at a Danish bank’s branch in Estonia, noticed that a London business, which moved more than $1 million through the branch almost daily, had filed a report with the U.K. government claiming it had no income or assets. Downloading the report cost Mr. Wilkinson one pound.

The discrepancy didn’t immediately strike him as malicious. Later, he began tugging on the thread. And five years after Mr. Wilkinson raised the alarm, his old employer, Danske Bank , DNKEY -3.20% last month announced that more than $230 billion had flowed from Russia and other former Soviet states through its tiny branch in Estonia. A large part of this was probably illicit money, the bank has said.

It is a money-laundering scandal on a grand scale, broaching one of the West’s rawest subjects, its tense relationship with Russia. The money involved is equal to more than all the corporate profits in Russia in a year. The scandal has tarred the reputation of Denmark, a country ranked among the world’s most transparent, and wiped out nearly half the stock-market value of the Scandinavian country’s largest bank, which knew about the problems for years before they became public. Its star CEO has resigned.

The revelations have ignited soul-searching in Europe about the cost incurred by some of its banks to survive the global financial crisis, especially how they welcomed flows of thinly monitored money from countries with weak rule of law. Regulators increasingly wonder whether their defenses against criminal money are broken, given how so much moved through the brand-name bank of a Scandinavian nation.

[Socal31]

1. This is easy.

It is all parked in Miami real estate.

[Wellstone ruled]

2. Fun fact,

It was the Estonian Secret Service whom first informed Micheal Steele about this . Amazing how the Banking World put a lid on it this long.