The Danish Danske Bank has been in the eye of a storm for quite some time after it discovers that one of its branches in Estonia has used for money laundering. It has now emerged that the bank had even used gold bullion to launder money.
The revelations are going to be embarrassing for Denmark’s biggest financial entity. The bank serves as many as 5 million customers in Denmark, along with headquartered in the capital city Copenhagen.
The money laundering at its Estonia operations went on from 2007 through to 2015. According to the investigators who have been looking into the matter, Danske Bank may have helped in laundering as much as $223 billion during the period. The latest revelations show the sheer scale of the operation at the Estonian arm of the bank. It has emerged that the bank allowed a handful of customers to convert their wealth into gold and store it at the bank.
It has revealed that most of those customers were from Russia. A team of journalists, who had been reporting on the matter, penned a joint report. They stated that the bank used to allow the customer to “convert their money into gold bars and coins, according to the documents, which date back to the middle of 2012.”
The actual volume of gold used for this scheme has not yet ascertained, but it should note that it must have been considerable. Any individual in Estonia who buys 250 grams or more are issued a gold without a certificate. The bank has now closed the branch in Estonia from where the whole scandal erupted, but other than the conduct of the bank, larger questions about political funding could also be raised. Because foreign funding has now become a major issue in many political campaigns, the behavior of banks about such illicit money is of paramount importance for governments and nations.
