How one banker revealed a $ 234 billion fraud in Danske Bank

 To stop the laundering of Russian money, it took 1 pound and more than one year
In order to detect fraudulent transactions that spilled over into one of the world's largest money laundering scandals, it took 1 pound sterling.
It was how much Howard Wilkinson, a British trader in the Estonian branch of Danske Bank, paid in the summer of 2012 to download the report that the British firm Lantana Trade LLP submitted to the registrar Companies House. Lantana spent almost every day at least $ 1 million through the Estonian branch. For five months, the Danske documents testified that this amount was $ 480 million. that she has zero profit. And in the column "net assets" stood "0.00".
This surprised Wilkinson, although at first he did not take this information as evidence of fraudulent activity. He downloaded the Lantana report after he was in a hurry to complete the business before the summer holiday, the client manager asked him to help with the paperwork. Wilkinson reported the discrepancy to the regulatory compliance manager. A simple typo, he answered a few weeks later, adding that Danske had asked Lantana to submit a correct report. And Wilkinson forgot about this incident.
A year later, in September 2013, a senior bank official said that Lantana is no longer a Danske customer, Wilkinson, who now lives in the UK, told The Wall Street Journal. Another employee, he said, told him that one of the owners of Lantana was a relative of Vladimir Putin. A spokesman for the Russian president in September 2018 denied this information. Lantana is no longer registered in the UK, it was not possible to contact her.
“Somewhere on the cortex of my brain I’m stuck that something is wrong here,” Wilkinson says. He began to understand. And although the Danske management, despite all the appeals and even letters that Wilkinson began writing as an informant, did not take any action for a long time, in 2015 the highly profitable business of the Estonian branch on work with non-residents was eventually abandoned. In 2017, Danske hired several firms to conduct an external investigation, and in September 2018 published a report on its results. It was reported that in 2007 - 2015. about 200 billion euros ($ 234 billion) from Russia and the CIS countries passed through the Estonian branch and a significant part of them could be classified as suspicious transactions. Of the approximately 15,000 accounts, about 6,200, as reported by Danske, have “the highest risk indicators”. Danske CEO Thomas Borgen, who previously headed the international division, which also included the Estonian branch, resigned.
Six countries are investigating Danske, including criminal ones.
No questions
The WSJ investigation is based on hundreds of pages of Danske internal documentation, including memoranda and client notes, interviews with dozens of bankers and regulators.
Estonian bank Eesti Forekspank aroused suspicion among regulators even before it became part of an international group. In 2006, Andrei Kozlov, first deputy chairman of the Bank of Russia, complained to local regulators during a trip to Estonia that the bank, which had already changed owners a couple of times and eventually became part of the Finnish Sampo Bank, was conducting questionable operations for Russians suspected of evading paying taxes and corruption. Three months later, Kozlov, who energetically fought cash and money laundering, was killed in Moscow. The Moscow City Court has recognized Alexey Frenkel, former Chairman of the Board of VIP Bank, as the ordering party for the murder.