Sweden’s Supreme Court has acquitted former Swedbank chief executive Birgitte Bonnesen, overturning the only prison conviction handed to a senior Nordic banker in connection with one of Europe’s biggest money-laundering scandals, the Financial Times reported. 

Bonnesen, who ran Sweden’s oldest bank from 2016 until her dismissal in 2019, had been convicted in 2024 of “gross swindling” over statements she made in media interviews about Swedbank’s anti-money-laundering (AML) controls and operations in Estonia.

The Supreme Court said on Tuesday that several interviews Bonnesen gave in 2018 were not intended to spread misleading information and were protected under constitutional freedom-of-expression laws, the FT reported. The high court found the interviews were conducted as part of journalistic activity and that her answers were therefore covered by the right to communicate information, according to a Bloomberg report. 

The ruling ends years of criminal proceedings against Bonnesen, a 69-year-old Danish executive, tied to her public comments during a widening Baltic banking scandal involving suspicious transactions flowing through Nordic lenders from the former Soviet Union, Bloomberg said. 

The Swedbank case formed part of a broader regional scandal in which tens of billions of euros of funds of questionable origin, much of it from Russia and other ex-Soviet states, moved through the Baltic branches of Swedbank and Danske Bank in the 2000s and 2010s, prompting the departures of the chief executives of both banks.

U.S. authorities opened multiyear investigations into both lenders, resulting in a heavy penalty for Danske Bank but no punishment for Swedbank, whose role remains under investigation by the New York Department of Financial Services, the FT reported. The U.S. Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission have separately closed their probes into Swedbank without imposing penalties. 

The acquittal is likely to renew debate over the difficulty of holding senior bankers criminally accountable in sprawling financial misconduct and money-laundering cases, an issue campaigners have long raised in Europe and the United States, according to the FT.

Separately from the Baltic money-laundering affair, Sweden’s financial regulator is conducting a new investigation into Swedbank covering the bank’s customer due-diligence measures between 2023 and 2025, Bloomberg said.

Read more at the Financial Times

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