Swedbank Says US DOJ Closes Probe Into Bank Without Enforcement

The U.S. Department of Justice closed its investigation into Swedbank AB without any enforcement action, bringing an almost seven-year money laundering investigation closer to conclusion.

The investigation by the New York Department of Financial Services is still ongoing, the bank said in a statement Wednesday.

“With this information, we leave behind a new investigation into historic shortcomings,” Tomas Hedberg, head of Swedbank’s task force and deputy chief executive, said in a statement.

The Securities and Exchange Commission also concluded its investigation into Sweden’s oldest bank in September without taking further action. The SEC investigation, launched in 2019, focused on Swedbank’s past failures related to money laundering and counterterrorism financing, as well as shortcomings in the way the bank disclosed information about its Baltic branches.

The decision moves Swedbank closer to drawing a line under years of scrutiny over how it handles anti-money laundering controls on its Baltic operations.

A number of Northern lenders, including Swedbank and Danske Bank A/S, found themselves at the center of a $230 billion Estonian laundering case that stretched from 2007 to 2015. At the heart of the scandal were accusations that banks had seized billions of dollars in suspicious funds from the former Soviet Union.

Swedbank, Sweden’s second largest bank by market value, was fined 4 billion Swedish krona by Swedish authorities in 2020 for violating anti-money laundering rules.

The situation worsened for Swedbank after former Chief Executive Officer Birgitte Bonnesen was found guilty by a Swedish court in 2024 of disseminating misleading statements to the media in connection with the scandal. In June, Bonnesen was given the right to appeal his 15-month prison sentence.

This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to the text.