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Former Swedbank chief govt Birgitte Bonnesen is dealing with 15 months in jail after a Swedish appeals court docket convicted her of spreading deceptive details about the financial institution’s cash laundering issues in Estonia.
Bonnesen, who led Sweden’s oldest financial institution from 2016 till she was fired by its board in 2019, was convicted of “gross swindling” by the Svea Courtroom of Enchantment, making her the highest-ranking Swedish banker to go to jail over the scandal.
She had beforehand been answerable for the financial institution’s Baltic enterprise.
“The court docket has assessed a number of statements that the CEO has made to the press and fairness analysts”, the court docket stated in a press release on Tuesday.
“The court docket has concluded that two of the statements have been incorrect or misrepresented details in a approach that they’ve been deceptive within the sense of the Swedish Prison Code.”
Bonnesen supposed to enchantment towards the decision, her lawyer, Per Samuelsson, advised TT, a Swedish information company. She was acquitted of different expenses introduced towards her.
The conviction pertains to one in all Europe’s greatest money-laundering scandals. Each Swedbank and Denmark’s Danske Financial institution have been alleged to have been a part of a system that allowed Russian oligarchs and criminals to maneuver cash via their Baltic branches and into the western monetary system.
The Swedish court docket stated on Tuesday that Bonnesen “disseminated deceptive statements” in newspaper and TV interviews in relation to the financial institution’s third-quarter leads to 2018.
“The statements conveyed the deceptive message that there didn’t exist any suspicious cash laundering hyperlinks to the operations in Estonia of one other financial institution,” the court docket stated.
“The deceptive information was liable to affect the evaluation of the Swedish financial institution from a monetary viewpoint, and thereby trigger a loss.”
Sweden’s financial crime authority charged Bonnesen with fraud and market manipulation in January 2022.
Swedbank commissioned a report into the matter by legislation agency Clifford Probability, which discovered that the financial institution had carried out €37bn of transactions with a excessive threat for cash laundering between 2014 and 2019.
An inner Swedbank report, seen by public broadcaster SVT, discovered about €80bn of cash flowed via the non-resident consumer enterprise of the financial institution within the Baltics from 2008 till 2013, most of it from Russia and different ex-Soviet states.
Swedbank cancelled Bonnesen’s severance pay in March 2020 following the publication of the Clifford Probability report. The doc judged that statements Bonnesen made in late 2018 and early 2019, because the scandal was creating, have been “inaccurate or offered with out enough context”.
Nonetheless, the financial institution determined to not pursue any authorized case of its personal towards Bonnesen or her predecessor Michael Wolf, who was in cost from 2009 till 2016.
