At the end of 2018, a softly spoken British executive matter-of-factly told the European Parliament how to clean tens of billions of dirty dollars. Howard Wilkinson’s voice shook slightly as he described to MEPs how money from the former Soviet Union was flushed through Danske Bank, where he once worked, into the international financial system.
It had been Wilkinson who first blew the whistle on what was happening at the Danish institution, particularly its Estonian subsidiary. Investigators now believe some $200bn was funnelled through the accounts of Danske Bank’s customers. It may have been the biggest money-laundering machine ever uncovered.
These schemes work by banks transferring funds on behalf of shell companies with anonymous or opaque ownership. At the European Parliament, Wilkinson used a PowerPoint demonstration to stress that dirty money went through banks in Russia, Denmark, Lithuania, Estonia and the United States, as well as the Russian subsidiary of a European bank and the European subsidiary of a US bank.
