Denmark to revamp financial watchdog

COPENHAGEN: Denmark plans to strengthen its financial regulator to make it better able to fight money laundering, its business minister said yesterday, as the country’s largest bank, Danske Bank, is embroiled in a major scandal.

The scandal involves € 200 billion (RM959 billion) in payments through Danske’s Estonian branch between 2007 and 2015, many of which the bank said in a report last month it thinks are suspicious.

The scandal has led the bank’s former chief executive Thomas Borgen to resign and almost halved Danske Bank share price since February.

“Obviously, supervision must be strengthened and conducted in a different way than it has been done in the period 20072015 when we can see that Europe’s largest money laundering case was not detected,” conservative minister Rasmus Jarlov said on Facebook early yesterday.

He said a profound evaluation of the Financial Supervisory Authority (FSA) had begun and that it would include inputs from the FSA itself as well as from other stakeholders.

“It is a great task, and it must be done thoroughly,” the minister said.

The FSA’s handling of the Danske Bank case has been widely criticised, and the European Union’s banking supervisor has begun an inquiry into it.

Jarlov said t was crucial that the FSA be given tools to scrutinise the information it gets from banks more thoroughly.

“It seems that supervision largely has been based on the banks’ own assessments of how they themselves think they are combating money laundering. That is obviously not enough,” he said. – Reuters