re money laundering danske bank, estonia that i can't properly reply to?
couldn't find date at reuters article, found this from forbes, lots more info including SURPRISE involvement of some big US banks
related(?) was it estonia, lithuania or latvia that someone ran a bunch of phony irs refunds thru some years ago? one address, was it hundreds of "refunds"? wondered who was getting paid off……
Sep 30, 2018, 05:42pm
The Banks That Helped Danske Bank Estonia Launder Russian Money
Money laundering is a multi-bank phenomenon. Danske Bank Estonia has been revealed as the hub of a $234bn money laundering scheme involving Russian and Eastern European customers. But Danske Bank Estonia couldn’t do this by itself. Much of the money was paid in U.S. dollars, and for that, it needed help from other banks. Banks that had access to Fedwire, the Federal Reserve's electronic settlement system. Big banks, in other words.
It appears that four big banks helped Danske Bank Estonia make its dodgy transactions. J.P. Morgan, Bank of America and Deutsche Bank AG all made dollar transfers on behalf of the Estonian branch’s non-resident customers. And according to the Wall Street Journal, Citigroup’s Moscow branch may have been involved in some financial transfers in and out of Danske Bank Estonia. But how much responsibility do these banks bear for these transfers? Could they reasonably have been expected to know – or suspect - that the money was dirty?
Banks that make transactions on behalf of other banks are known as “correspondent banks”. In the past, correspondent banks often had little information about the originator or final recipient of the money they were transmitting. They simply trusted that their customer bank was acting legally and that its customers were above board. Old habits die very hard: in 2016, the correspondent banks involved in the FIFA corruption case, which include Citigroup, HSBC, Wells Fargo and Barclays, all claimed that they could not have known that the transfers were corrupt.
But these days, banks are expected to “know their customers’ customers”. They are supposed to conduct their own checks to make sure that they are not unwittingly being used to launder dirty money.
In the case of Danske Bank Estonia, one of the correspondent banks did suspect something was wrong. In 2013, J.P. Morgan terminated its correspondent banking relationship with Danske Bank Estonia because it was concerned that it was being used as a conduit for dodgy funds. Deutsche Bank, however, blithely continued to make U.S. dollar wire transfers on behalf of the Estonia branch’s non-resident customers after J.P. Morgan's departure. So did Bank of America, which replaced J.P. Morgan.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/francescoppola/2018/09/30/the-banks-that-helped-danske-bank-estonia-launder-russian-money/#11cd12947319