Nordea Fined $23 Million Over Anti-Money-Laundering Controls — Update
By Dominic Chopping
Nordea Bank said it was fined around $23 million following a legal case in Denmark surrounding the bank's anti-money-laundering processes and controls.
The Nordic lender said Monday that the Copenhagen City Court delivered its verdict in a case that concerned the period between 2012 and 2015 and has been running for more than a decade.
The court on Monday acquitted Nordea on five out of seven counts alleging inadequate anti-money-laundering controls, with the bank fined 155 million Danish kroner ($23.1 million) over the two remaining counts.
Authorities investigated the bank's Danish unit to probe its compliance with anti-money-laundering regulations and whether it had adequate processes to identify and combat money-laundering.
This led to orders by the Danish Financial Supervisory Authority to improve its know-your-customer and transaction-monitoring procedures, with the matter subsequently referred to the police. Denmark's National Unit for Serious Crime--known as NSK--then filed charges in 2024, claiming that around $3.9 billion of suspicious transactions had flowed through the bank.
"NSK has accused Nordea of violating the Money Laundering Act in the period from 2012 to 2015," it said in a statement at the time. "In NSK's opinion, this occurred, among other things, because Nordea did not sufficiently investigate the bank's Russian customers' transactions and because Nordea ignored warnings about transactions to exchange offices in Copenhagen."
Nordea said it has not been charged with money laundering or with assisting in money laundering.
The bank is adequately provisioned, it added.
"Nordea will now review the verdict in its entirety," it said in a statement. "This applies to both the conclusions of the verdict and the court's reasoning. Only then will it be decided whether Nordea will appeal."
It said that the initial appeal period is two weeks from the date of the verdict, and if the prosecution appeals all or part of the verdict, Nordea will have an additional two weeks to decide whether to lodge a counterappeal.
Write to Dominic Chopping at dominic.chopping@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
November 09, 2026 10:03 ET (15:03 GMT)
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