Swedbank Says US DOJ Closes Probe Into Bank Without Enforcement

The US Department of Justice closed its investigation into Swedbank AB without an enforcement action, bringing an almost seven-year money-laundering probe nearer to a conclusion.

An investigation by the New York Department of Financial Services is still ongoing, the bank said in a statement Wednesday.

“With this information we are placing another investigation of historical shortcomings behind us,” Tomas Hedberg, Swedbank’s head of special task force and deputy chief executive officer, said in the statement.

The Securities and Exchange Commission in September also concluded its probe into Sweden’s oldest bank without taking any further action. The SEC investigation, launched in 2019, focused on Swedbank’s past failures related to anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing, as well as shortcomings in how the bank disclosed information related to its Baltic branches.

The decision brings Swedbank closer to being able to draw a line under years of scrutiny into its handling of anti-money-laundering controls in its Baltic operations.

A number of Nordic lenders, including Swedbank and Danske Bank A/S, found themselves embroiled in a $230 billion Estonian laundering affair that spanned 2007 to 2015. At the center of the scandal was the accusation that the banks had handled billions of dollars in suspicious funds from the former Soviet Union.

Swedbank, Sweden’s second-largest bank by market value, was fined 4 billion Swedish kronor by Swedish authorities in 2020 for breaching anti-money-laundering rules. 

The situation was compounded for Swedbank after former Chief Executive Officer Birgitte Bonnesen was found guilty by a Swedish court in 2024 of disseminating misleading statements to the media in connection to the scandal. In June, Bonnesen was granted the right to appeal her prison sentence of 15 months. 

©2026 Bloomberg L.P.

This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.