Most documents in money laundering scandals are dry. Endless bank statements of money sloshing from account to account and bank to bank in an attempt to cover any trail.
But every now and then a different type of document emerges that allows great insight into just what was going on. At Danske Bank — home to one of the world’s biggest money laundering scandals, with €200bn of non-resident money flowing through its tiny Estonian branch in a nine-year period — that document is one that, admittedly, has a rather dry title.
“Financial intermediaries and bond trading in International Banking in Estonia” was a memo circulated in the Estonian branch in 2013 and towards the end of that year to senior executives in Copenhagen.
Seen by the Financial Times, the memo may well be the most crucial so far revealed in the scandal as it lays out one of the main tactics used by Danske to move non-resident money — money that came from outside Estonia and mostly from Russia. It raises tough questions for just about everybody involved in the scandal from the bank itself to regulators and even a whistleblower who exposed the affair.
The tactic used by Danske, “mirror trades”, was a…
