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Former Swedbank CEO Birgitte Bonnesen faces 15 months in prison after a Swedish appeals court convicted her of spreading misleading information about the bank’s money laundering problems in Estonia.
Bonnesen, who led Sweden’s oldest bank from 2016 until she was dismissed by the board of directors in 2019, was convicted by the Svea Court of Appeal of “gross fraud”, making her the highest-ranking Swedish banker to be sentenced over the scandal had to go to prison.
Previously, she was in charge of the bank’s Baltic activities.
“The court reviewed several statements that the CEO made to the press and stock analysts,” the court said in a statement on Tuesday.
“The court concluded that two of the statements were incorrect or misrepresented facts in a way that was misleading within the meaning of the Swedish Criminal Code.”
Bonnesen planned to appeal the verdict, her lawyer Per Samuelsson told TT, a Swedish news agency. She was acquitted of other charges against her.
The conviction relates to one of the largest money laundering scandals in Europe. Both Swedbank and Denmark’s Danske Bank are alleged to have been part of a system that allowed Russian oligarchs and criminals to move money into the Western financial system through their Baltic branches.
The Swedish court said on Tuesday that Bonnesen “spread misleading statements” in newspaper and television interviews regarding the bank’s third-quarter results in 2018.
“The statements conveyed the misleading message that there were no suspected money laundering links with the activities in Estonia of another bank,” the court said.
“The misleading information could affect the assessment of the Swedish bank from a financial point of view and therefore cause a loss.”
The Swedish Economic Crime Authority charged Bonnesen with fraud and market manipulation in January 2022.
Swedbank commissioned law firm Clifford Chance to conduct a report on the matter, which found that the bank had carried out €37 billion worth of transactions with a high risk of money laundering between 2014 and 2019.
An internal Swedbank report, seen by public broadcaster SVT, shows that between 2008 and 2013, around 80 billion euros of money flowed through the bank’s non-resident client operations in the Baltic states, most of it from Russia and other ex -Soviet states.
Swedbank canceled Bonnesen’s severance package in March 2020 following the publication of the Clifford Chance report. The document found that statements Bonnesen made in late 2018 and early 2019, as the scandal was developing, were “inaccurate or presented without sufficient context.”
However, the bank decided not to file its own lawsuit against Bonnesen or her predecessor Michael Wolf, who was in charge from 2009 to 2016.