(Bloomberg) -- The chief executive of Swedbank AB says how the lender became mired in a massive money laundering scandal will soon be revealed by the bank’s own investigation.
Jens Henriksson, CEO of the Stockholm-based bank since October, says the information may be available as soon as Monday.
“Responsibility is like doing a jigsaw puzzle because on Monday the next piece comes with the report,” he said in an interview late on Thursday. “And after that I think one can draw a conclusion.”
Henriksson spoke after Sweden’s biggest mortgage bank was fined a record 4 billion kronor ($386 million) by Sweden’s financial services authority, the first sizable penalty Swedbank has received since the laundering scandal erupted last year.
Swedbank will publish the full findings of the report next week, after having asked law firm Clifford Chance to launch a probe into its Baltic operations from 2007 through 2019. The information may determine the scale of any fine from the U.S. regulator.
The Swedish FSA found that Swedbank didn’t take “proper and sufficient action” to counter the risk of money laundering, “despite several internal and external reports warning about deficiencies in the Baltic subsidiaries.”
In a separate comment, Estonia’s FSA said the bank chose to take on high-risk clients without proper controls in place. A criminal investigation by Estonian prosecutors is ongoing.
The case forms part of a broader complex of scandals that includes Danske Bank A/S and revealed a systematic flow of dirty money from the former Soviet Union via the eastern outposts of Nordic banks and into the West. A similar probe into SEB AB is still ongoing, according to Erik Thedeen, the head of Sweden’s FSA.
For investors, several questions remain.
“Who deliberately withheld information? Who knew about it, and how high in the management did it go?” Joacim Olsson, the CEO of the Swedish Shareholders’ Association, said. “It’s inescapable that the previous CEO of Swedbank has been responsible in some way.”
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