Its account was marked "dormant" at UK Companies House and yet it had a credit balance at Danske of $965,418 on the same date. A colleague later told Mr. Wilkinson that the bank did not know who the beneficial owners were but "apparently it was discovered that they included the family of Vladimir Putin, Russia's president, and the FSB [Russia's intelligence service]", according to the email seen by the FT.
Danske's internal audit team was sent to investigate the Estonia operation in January 2014. Yet Mr. Wilkinson complained in a further email in April that despite his warnings "no related client account has been closed by management" and "there appears to have been no attempt by management to identify the full scope of the problem of UK LLPs submitting false accounts".
He reported that a senior executive told him "[Danske Bank] is not the police" and "[Danske Bank] has no obligation to report false client accounts to the authorities." That same day, he resigned and sent an email to Copenhagen, signing off: "Sad to say, it seems to me that things are totally broken here."
Wow. So internal whistleblowing procedures are token efforts which are actually shortcuts to get yourself 'resigned'. I become less and less surprised when reality turns out to match Dilbert one-to-one. Which is sad.
Questions have also been asked as to whether Danske received special treatment from its regulator, which was until May headed by the bank's former chief financial officer.
I.e. the body that had sole responsibility to enforce anti-money laundering on the bank was its former CFO. SMH...
