“THE bank has clearly failed to live up to its responsibility,” said Ole Andersen, chairman of Danske Bank, on September 19th. Well, indeed. The findings of an inquiry into the laundering of money, much of it from Russia, through Danske’s Estonian branch are sobering. The euro amount rinsed through the branch’s books runs to 12 digits and Danske missed chance after chance to stop the sluice. To no one’s surprise its chief executive, Thomas Borgen, has resigned.
9月19日，丹麦丹斯克银行主席奥莱·安德森说道：“显然，银行没有尽到自己的责任。”确实如此。在对丹斯克银行爱沙尼亚分支机构的洗钱行为——大部分来自俄罗斯——调查结果发人深省。进入该分行账簿的欧元金额高达12位数，而丹斯克银行屡次错失阻止这股洪流的机会。不出所料，该行首席执行官托马斯•博根下台。
Denmark’s biggest bank had already admitted doing too little to prevent the abuse of its branch between 2007, when it bought Finland’s Sampo Bank, the unit’s owner, and 2015. An 87-page report by Bruun & Hjejle, a law firm, both tries to quantify the suspicious activity and traces how Danske’s anti-laundering procedures went so catastrophically wrong.
这家丹麦最大的银行此前承认，在2007年从其所有者，芬兰的Sampo银行手中收购到2015年期间，在阻止滥用权力方面无所作为。Bruun和Hjejle律师事务所出具了一份长达87页的报告，试图对可疑的资金流动加以量化，追踪丹斯克的反洗钱程序为何会犯下如此大错。
The main conduit was the branch’s “non-resident portfolio”, comprising about 10,000 accounts, of which 3,000-4,000 were open at any one time. The branch also housed another 5,000 non-residents’ accounts. Starting with the fishiest, the investigators have examined 6,200 accounts and deem “the vast majority” to be suspicious. By contrast, the branch had reported only 760 clients to the Financial Intelligence Unit, the Estonian police division dealing with financial crime. The investigators have identified 177 customers—mostly partnerships registered in Britain or well-known tax havens—potentially involved in the “Russian Laundromat”, a vast fraud exposed by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a group of investigative journalists.
一个主要渠道是该分行的“非居民投资组合”，包括约1万个账户，而其中有3000至4000个账户在随时开立的。该分行还有5000个非居民账户。调查人员从最可疑的账户开始调查，检查了6200个账户，认定“绝大多数”为可疑。相比之下，该分行向负责金融犯罪的爱沙尼亚警察部门金融情报部门报告的客户只有760人。调查人员确认，有177名客户——主要是在英国注册的合伙企业或知名的避税天堂——可能参与了“俄罗斯自助洗钱店”的行动。“俄罗斯自助洗钱店”是由一组调查记者发起的“有组织犯罪与腐败报告项目”曝光的一项大规模金融诈骗活动。
Mere suspicion, of course, proves nothing. As the investigators did not sift the 9.5m transactions on the 15,000 accounts, they cannot say how much was laundered. But by any reasonable guess, the sum is staggering: €200bn ($234bn at current exchange rates), mostly in euros and dollars, flowed through the accounts, 23% of it from Russia. “It is expected that a large part of the payments were suspicious,” the report drily concludes.
当然，仅仅是怀疑并不能证明什么。由于调查人员没有对这1.5万个账户中的950万笔交易进行仔细筛选，无法说出洗钱的数额。不过，据合理地猜测，总涉及的数额是触目惊心：流经这些账户的金额达到2000亿欧元，主要是欧元和美元，有23%来自俄罗斯。这份报告直言：“预计大部分款项都是可疑的。”
Chances to clean up went begging almost from the day Danske bought Sampo. In 2007 the Estonian authorities found flaws in Sampo’s procedures, and the Russian central bank told Danish supervisors that non-resident customers “permanently participate” in transactions intended to avoid taxes and customs payments, or to launder money to the tune of “billions of roubles monthly”. The next year Danske dropped, on cost grounds, a plan to bring its Baltic subsidiaries onto its group information-technology platform.
从丹斯克收购萨姆波银行之日起，就有机会进行内部清理。2007年，爱沙尼亚当局发现萨姆波银行内部流程存在缺陷，俄罗斯央行对丹麦监管机构表示，非居民客户“一直在参与”旨在避税和避税的交易，或以“每月数十亿卢布”的规模洗钱。第二年，丹斯克以成本为由放弃了将其波罗的海子公司加入全集团信息技术平台的计划。
In 2013 a correspondent bank clearing dollar transactions from the branch (J.P. Morgan, says the Financial Times), ended the relationship. That December an employee in Estonia blew the whistle; soon afterwards internal auditors pointed out weaknesses in anti-money-laundering practices. Even then Danske believed any problems were being fixed and misjudged their scale. Only in 2015 did the bank begin a “proper run-off” of the non-resident portfolio, the report says. The last accounts were closed in early 2016.
2013年，一家清算来自该行事美元交易的代理银行(据英国《金融时报》报道称是摩根大通银行)结束了合作关系。那年12月，爱沙尼亚的一名雇员曝料此事;不久，内审人员指出了反洗钱操作中存在不足。即使在那时，丹斯克银行仍然认为解决了所有的问题，并错误地判断了问题的严重性。上述报告称，丹斯克银行直到2015年才开始有非居民投资组合“适当地流失”。最后一个账户是在2016年初消户。
Contrite, Danske is giving its gross income from the branch over the nine years, DKr1.5bn ($235m), to a fund to fight financial crime. But what took it so long to spot trouble? Managers and systems failed at pretty much every level, from Tallinn to Copenhagen. The branch was allowed too much independence, partly because it was small, accounting for only 0.5% of Danske’s assets. But it was also highly profitable, making a return on allocated capital of 60% in 2013, when the Lithuanian branch earned only 16% and the Latvian one 7%. That should have rung bells. Employees may have colluded with crooks: the bank has reported eight to Estonian police.
丹斯克银行懊悔不已，将其过去9年的总收入——15亿丹麦克朗(合2.35亿美元)——捐给了基金，用于打击金融犯罪。但是，为何花了如此长的时间才发现问题呢?从塔林到哥本哈根，管理人员和管理系统几乎在每一个层面上都没有起到作用。该分行获最太多的独立性，一个原因在于它规模小，只占丹斯克资产的0.5%。可是，它的盈利能力很高，在2013年，该行的立陶宛分行分配资本回报率为60%，拉脱维亚分行的回报率仅为7%。这种情况应该敲响警钟。雇员可能与诈骗人员勾结：丹斯克银行向爱沙尼亚警方起诉了8人。
Danske’s is just the most spectacular of a string of money-laundering scandals afflicting Europe from the Mediterranean to the Baltic. This month ING, a Dutch bank, was fined €775m; its chief financial officer lost his job. The European Commission recently proposed giving the European Banking Authority, a supervisor, more power to co-ordinate national authorities and even to compel them to start investigations. Tighter controls cannot come too soon.
从地中海到波罗的海的一系列洗钱丑闻中，丹斯克银行的丑闻是最为引人注目。九月，荷兰银行被罚款7.75亿欧元，首席财务官也丢了饭碗。欧盟委员会最近提议赋予监管机构欧洲银行管理局更多权力，以协调成员国当局，甚至要推动成员国展开调查。更严格的监管措施应尽早到来。
编译：李圆敏