Danske Probe Draws U.S. Pressure for Convictions, Estonia Says

(Bloomberg) -- The U.S. is putting pressure on Estonia to make sure criminal investigations into money laundering at Danske Bank A/S result in convictions, according to the government in Tallinn.

Martin Helme, Estonian finance minister, says meetings he held in the U.S. earlier this month made clear to him that the government in Washington D.C. has a number of expectations as to how the ongoing case is handled.

Speaking to reporters in Tallinn, Helme said that the feeling among U.S. Treasury representatives was that “it can’t be that no-one is punished.”

The “very clear message from Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Financing Marshall Billingslea was that he can’t tell us how many people need to be punished for money laundering in Estonia, but this number can’t be zero.” If that were the outcome, it would send “a message to the Americans that we are not taking the anti-money laundering fight seriously,” Helme said.

Estonia may go down in history as the site of one of the worst money-laundering scandals ever, after it emerged that a local unit of Denmark’s Danske Bank became a hub in Europe to channel dirty funds from the former Soviet Union into the West for almost a decade. The man who used to run the unit has since committed suicide and Danske has been kicked out of Estonia. Several of its former executives have had preliminary criminal charges brought against them and Estonian authorities are probing 12 former employees of Danske.

Helme, who last week made clear he hopes that Estonia will be able to pocket most of the proceeds of any fines levied on Danske, said on Tuesday that authorities in his country are working together with the FBI to investigate the bank. He also said that there is now a “minimal” amount of laundering going on in Estonia.

To contact the reporter on this story: Ott Ummelas in Tallinn at oummelas@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Tasneem Hanfi Brögger at tbrogger@bloomberg.net;Christian Wienberg at cwienberg@bloomberg.net

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