The European Commission sought the help of the European Banking Authority, an EU regulator for banking, to help investigate and resolve what happened in the case of Danske Bank's money laundering problem.
The report from Financial Times said the European Commission wanted to get to the bottom of the case, from any internal problems that may have happened. This investigation also had the bank's chief executive officer resigning, an event that happened the previous week.
The bank was found to have failed to investigate questionable transactions that passed through its checkers. There were "major deficiencies" that occurred that allowed €200 billion to flow through Danske Bank's Estonian branch over the period of nine years. The transactions were allegedly made by people who stayed in Russia and the British Virgin Island but were never residents of the said area.
CEO Thomas Borgen may have stepped down, but the problem didn't depart with him. It's a problem that stems from the weak enforcement of the supposedly strict laws of the European Union's money transactions. It's these "limited sanctions," Transparency International expert Laure Brillaud said, that allows questionable transactions like the one that passed through the Danish bank to flourish.
CNN Money presented a possible case on why the European Union finds it hard to enforce the sanctions-the Union doesn't have a single monetary body to control the transactions. There are already three main regulators operating within the European Union, but the problem is that there are only a total of two persons within these combined regulators working on these cases at any given time.
This is one of the many reasons why the European Union is a popular destination for launderers and fraudulent individuals. Dirty money can easily flow through any of these 28 countries. Only now do calls for stricter measures arrive, but the problem is that the damage had already been done.
Jasper Berg of the Danish FSA had already said that the bank was ready to cooperate in any means with the authorities while honoring the confidentiality of its clients. To this end, they have contacted the Financial Action Taskforce, an international watchdog for money laundering, on how to better their services to combat fraudulent transactions.
