STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Swedbank, which has been embroiled in a money laundering scandal in the Baltics, discovered insufficient anti money laundering controls in an internal report in 2016, Swedish business daily Dagens Industri reported on Tuesday.
A television report on Sweden's public broadcaster SVT last week alleged that money laundering could have occurred in relation to at least 40 billion Swedish crowns (£3.2 billion) transferred between Baltics accounts at Swedbank and Danske Bank between 2007 and 2015.
Swedbank said in an emailed statement to Reuters that it is constantly working to improve its processes to prevent money laundering and had implemented a series of improvements after receiving a presentation from its compliance unit.
"This is part of the bank's and the compliance function's regular work," Gabriel Francke Rodau, head of communications at Swedbank, said in the statement.
Latvia's financial regulator said last week it had fined Swedbank in 2016 for not paying "sufficient attention" to transactions that "had no apparent economic or visible lawful purpose". The regulator said Swedbank had failed at the time to obtain documents and data on the customers.
Danske is being investigated in five countries over some 200 billion euros (£173 billion) of suspicious payments from Russia, ex-Soviet states and elsewhere that were found to have flowed through its Estonian branch.
(Reporting by Johan Ahlander; Editing by Susan Fenton)
