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When the Stockholm Stock Exchange opened on Monday morning, Nordea’s share price plummeted and the stock was one of the big losers.
At 11 o’clock, the share price had fallen 5 percent after the Finnish Yle reported that the bank may have laundered SEK 1.5 billion in alleged money laundering during the years 2013-17.
The reveal was included in part of the gigantic leak from the US financial police that was revealed by the international journalistic network ICIJ this weekend.
The leak consists of the banks’ own suspicious reports, the so-called SARs, that banks are required to make when they find suspicious transactions.
The more than 2,000 documents deal with suspicious transactions over nearly two decades and are said to comprise SEK 17 billion.
The revelation has shaken the banking world considerably. In London, the world’s largest financial center, the share prices of major multinational banks plummeted. Barclays and HSBC stock prices fell more than four percent in early trading.
HSBC is the largest bank in Europe and its shares have lost half their value so far this year, as it expects large credit losses in the wake of the pandemic. With Monday’s press, the course now ends at the same level as in 1995.
According to the British BBC, HSBC’s US bank transferred 80 million dollars, just over 700 million crowns, in an alleged case of account fraud in Hong Kong.
The penalties that banks risk if they are exposed to money laundering have sharpened significantly in recent years. Recently, last spring, Swedbank received a 4 billion SEK corporate fine from Finansinspektionen, the highest level of fines to date that any Swedish bank has experienced.
Therefore, the fall in prices for banks is explained by investors taking into account the risk that several of the banks, such as Swedbank, will be heavily fined by various authorities, including those of the US.
Read more:
New leak: banks around the world wash huge amounts
Dan Lucas: The leak shows how easy it is for crime to launder money
