https://www.amlintelligence.com/2024/09/breaking-danske-bank-pays-7m-to-settle-money-laundering-probe-in-estonia/

Denmark’s Danske Bank has reached an agreement with French authorities to settle a probe into suspected money laundering by the bank in Estonia.

“Danske Bank has cooperated with the French authorities,” the lender said in a statement.

“[The company] has now reached a resolution with the French National Financial Prosecutor to settle this investigation by agreeing to pay €6.33 million ($7.04 million),” it said in a statement.

The charge is a fraction of the more than $2 billion that Danske agreed to pay to end probes in the United States last year.

The U.S. Department of Justice said Danske enabled high-risk customers who lived outside Estonia, including in neighboring Russia, to access the American financial system.

The bank became the subject of several investigations after an internal probe in September 2018 uncovered about 200 billion euros of payments made through its now-shuttered Estonian branch, with many payments appearing suspicious.

The U.S. probe was concluded in January 2023 after a judge accepted a plea from Danske to a bank fraud conspiracy charge and its agreement to pay more than $2 billion

French authorities began a formal investigation in 2019.

“We are pleased to have reached this resolution with the French National Financial Prosecutor,” Danske’s senior general counsel, Niels Heering, said in a statement.

This probe marked “the final investigation into the bank by any authority related to the non-resident portfolio at Danske Bank’s former Estonia branch”, Heering said.

The financial impact of the resolution with French authorities had already been provisioned for, Danske said.