The Estonian Financial Supervision (Finantsinspektsioon), issued a precept today to Danske Bank to terminate its activities in Estonia and ordered it to close its branch in Tallinn before the end of 2019. The precept stated that Danske Bank "violated anti-money laundering regulations for many years by allowing high-risk money-laundering clients to make suspicious transactions through the bank. In addition, it stated that Danske Bank misled the Estonian public authorities by providing them with inadequate information and thus actually hampered their investigation."
Estonia authorities have told Danske Bank that it must close the branch within eight months and repay its clients their deposits. Danske Bank is under investigation by several regulators for allegedly facilitating the laundering of about $230 billion by non-Estonians through its branch in Tallinn, Estonia, primarily by Russians, between 2007 and 2015.
The scandal was uncovered and reported internally by a British trader in Danske Bank’s Estonia office, Howard Wilkinson. Mr. Wilkinson confidentially raised concerns over the illegal money-laundering scheme in 2013. In October The Wall Street Journal published a feature detailing Wilkinson’s five-year journey to bring an end to this large-scale corruption.
Mr. Wilkinson is represented by whistleblower attorneys Kohn, Kohn & Colapinto, LLP (“KKC”). Wilkinson and his whistleblower lawyer, Stephen M. Kohn, testified before both the Danish and EU Parliaments late last year expressing frustration at Denmark’s and the EU’s lack of whistleblower protections which prevented him from reporting banking irregularities to European law enforcement after the bank refused to act on his internal reports.
“This is a lesson to corporate banks. Danske Bank made a grave error when it forced Mr. Wilkinson to sign a restrictive non-disclosure agreement, instead of working with Mr. Wilkinson in trying to fix the problems,” said Stephen M. Kohn.
“All of the banks responsible for this historic money-laundering scandal, not just the Dankse Bank, must be investigated by regulators and held fully accountable,” Kohn added.
Read more:
- Information about Danske Bank Whistleblower Howard Wilkinson.
- Warnings Were Ignored by Danske Bank Officials
- Finantsinspektsioon website
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Kohn, Kohn & Colapinto’s primary litigation includes representing international whistleblowers under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, tax fraud whistleblowers, qui tam reward laws, the False Claims Act, SEC whistleblowers and IRS whistleblowers. In 2012 the firm obtained the largest whistleblower reward given to a single individual in history ($104 million to UBS whistleblower (Bradley Birkenfeld). Stephen M. Kohn’s eighth book on whistleblower law is the highly respected The New Whistleblower’s Handbook (Lyons Press, 2017).