Birgitte Bonnesen, the former CEO of Sweden’s oldest bank Swedbank, has been sentenced to prison for one year and three months after being convicted of gross fraud.
Bonnesen earlier denied all charges, and was found not guilty by the district court regarding statements she made in 2018 and 2019, linked to the money laundering scandal at Swedbank’s Baltic business.
The Court of Appeal has now found that Bonnesen did provide misleading information when she was interviewed by Swedish media (Svenska Dagbladet and TT) regarding the release of its third quarterly report in 2018.
According to the Court, Bonnesen provided misleading information that the bank had no suspicion of money laundering events going on in the Baltics. That information was “likely to influence the assessment of the Swedish bank in financial terms and thereby cause damage.”
She was found not guilty of the alleged charges of providing misleading information to shareholders.
Money-laundering allegations
Back in 2019, the bank came under scrutiny when the Swedish TV news show Uppdrag Granskning revealed extensive suspected money laundering within Swedbank. Journalists found that at least SKr 40 billion ($3.9 billion) had been channelled between accounts in Swedbank and Danske Bank in the Baltics. The suspected crimes were linked to a former minister in the Russian government, Mikhail Abyzov.
In 2020, Finansinspektionen, Sweden’s financial supervisory authority, hit Swedbank with a record $400m fine due to ”major deficiencies in its work to combat money laundering in its Baltic operations.” Finansinspektionen said that the findings were serious, and found deficiencies in the bank’s risk assessment of customers, and that the bank did not have a validated model for customer risk classification. The investigation also found deficiencies in how the bank monitored ongoing business relationships.
In March 2022, the bank was served with another suspicion of money laundering notice at its Estonian branch for events in the period 2014-2016.
In June 2023, the subsidiary Swedbank AS in Latvia, paid $3,430,900 to the US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) to settle its potential Crimea sanctions, where it was found making 386 transactions that violated OFAC’s sanctions.