Nordea's Profits Sag; Bank Responds To Money Laundering Claims

Tom Burroughes

25 October 2018

Nordea, the Scandinavian bank which recently shifted its official headquarters to Finland from Sweden, has suffered a 21 per cent year-on-year drop in third-quarter operating profit, at €866 million, and total operating income fell by 14 per cent to €2.046 billion.

The profit figure was worse than analysts had expected, according to Reuters yesterday.

Separately, the bank hit back at claims from the firm Hermitage Capital Management, run by prominent investment figure Bill Browder, that the bank had enabled suspicious money transfers worth $400 million from the Baltic states between 2007 and 2013. Financial flows from this region have already embroiled Copenhagen-based Danske Bank in a major money laundering scandal.

“During the past weeks the media have reported that authorities across the Nordics have received documents from Hermitage Capital Management purporting to show that Nordea breached its responsibilities under anti-money laundering laws,” Nordea said.

"Earlier today, on 24 October 2018, in connection with the announcement of the third quarter results, Nordea CEO Casper von Koskull commented to the media that Nordea had not seen the report.

Subsequently we have received what appears to be a document, or parts of it, from Hermitage Capital Management originally sent to the Swedish authorities. We have received the document from a source with no connection to the authorities. We will review the document and provide our views to the appropriate authorities,” it continued.
“As we have communicated earlier on the topic of anti-money laundering, it is part of Nordea’s daily operations to continuously monitor, review and report on suspicious activities to the authorities. We do not accept being used as a platform for money laundering,” it added.

Browder, Hermitage’s founder and CEO, is famous as an activist investor in Russia – he was banned from the country several years ago – and is now pursuing banks that he claims are complicit in money laundering. Browder has reportedly said that he could not rule out that further evidence of illicit flows through Nordea may yet emerge. “The final number is unknown,” he is quoted by Bloomberg as saying this week. “We continue to work through all the data we have, and we continue to get more data from different countries.”

Browder is trying to find money that he says was laundered as part of a tax fraud uncovered by his attorney, Sergei Magnitsky, who died in a Russian prison in 2009.

A raft of European banks have been hit by money laundering and related issues in recent years, as a report from Fortytwo Data, a technology firm, has said.

Last year, Nordea decided to shift its HQ to Finland after Sweden announced that it intended to bring in a bank tax, and because it wanted to be treated similarly to other lenders overseen by the European Central Bank. The bank reportedly also intends to refocus its wealth management efforts in its core Scandinavian market. In January, Nordea took a decision to focus more on its core Nordic region business, selling its Luxembourg-based private banking operations to UBS.