Saudi Press

Saudi Arabia and the world
Friday, Aug 22, 2025

Newly Obtained Audit Report Details How Shady Clients from Around the World Moved Billions Through Estonia

Newly Obtained Audit Report Details How Shady Clients from Around the World Moved Billions Through Estonia

On a warm Monday morning in June 2014, two auditors from Estonia’s financial regulator stepped into the Tallinn office of Danske Bank, armed with a single piece of graph paper handwritten with the names of 18 of its clients, and demanded to see their records.

At first glance, the customers on the list sounded boring. They were mostly obscure trading companies with generic names like Hilux Services and Polux Management. But the auditors — who had been tipped off by a police unit that tracks financial crime — didn’t have to dig too deep before things got very strange.

The companies were moving huge amounts of money through Danske Bank from Russia, Azerbaijan, and Ukraine, and justifying them with nonsensical contracts.

One company with no website or internet presence, started by a 21-year-old from Azerbaijan, received millions of dollars from Russian state arms company Rosoboronexport for no clear reason. Another company from Uzbekistan bought $2 million worth of “building materials” from the remote British Virgin Islands. A third company agreed to loan out $150 million, but inexplicably transferred $582 million instead.

After more than a month poring over Danske’s books, the auditors produced a damning report about the bank’s failure even to try to understand what its own clients were doing, But it was never made public, even after the goings-on at Danske Estonia sparked one of the biggest money laundering scandals of all time.

In 2017, a team from OCCRP and the Danish newspaper Berlingske revealed that billions of dollars in dirty money had been moved through the bank’s Estonian branch. Only then, three years after it had been produced, did Danske’s head office get around to translating the Estonian audit.

Now, a copy of the report has been obtained by Berlingske and shared with OCCRP. It describes in exacting detail how the bank breached at least 47 different anti-money-laundering regulations — and how employees at the Tallinn branch enabled this by systematically ignoring hundreds of bizarre transactions.

In parts, it reads like a point-by-point list of the techniques offshore companies and politically exposed people use to transfer huge sums of money without accounting for their origin — and of the bank’s failure to question them.

“Danske was a textbook case where the bank’s risk level and its risk management were not in balance,” Kilvar Kessler, the head of the Finantsinspektsioon, or Estonian Financial Supervision Authority (FSA), told OCCRP.

“Why weren’t they? Because the profit coming from the branch with the risk was so high. If there would have been adequate risk control in place, such income wouldn’t have been possible.”

After seeing the first draft of his auditors’ report, Kessler was appalled. He immediately called Danske Estonia’s CEO, Aivar Rehe, and asked for a meeting. Soon afterwards, they were sitting together at an upscale restaurant in Tallinn’s picturesque Old Town.

“What have you guys been doing here?” he asked Rehe in dismay.

The bank head responded that without its lucrative offshore unit, Danske wouldn’t have a profitable business in Estonia.

Kessler asked if the head office in Copenhagen knew what was going on in Tallinn.

“Of course they knew,” he remembers Rehe saying.

Rehe committed suicide in 2019 amid a money-laundering probe into operations at the bank. He was not a suspect in the case but had been sought as a witness.

Danske Bank declined to answer specific questions related to this story. A press officer for the bank, Stefan Singh Kailay, directed journalists to a previous statement in which the bank acknowledged that it should never have had its portfolio of offshore customers.

“It is also obvious that we were too slow to acknowledge the scale of the problems and get the portfolio closed down,” Kailay said.

Thousand-Dollar Paint Cans and Nonexistent Addresses


The heart of Danske’s dirty business in Estonia lay in what was known as the “non-resident banking unit,” a team of about a dozen bankers who catered exclusively to foreign customers in places like Azerbaijan and Russia.

Last year, OCCRP reported on how these bankers — known as “relationship managers” — actively helped their clients evade anti-money-laundering regulations by running offshore companies for them.

But even when they weren’t conspiring with their clients, the relationship managers were ignoring obvious signs of money laundering, the FSA audit found.

For example, they accepted documentation from clients written in Azerbaijani, even though nobody on the team spoke the language. (The bank’s official policy was to only accept documents in English, Estonian, or Russian.) When asked about this, the bank replied that one relationship manager, Oksana Lindmets, had “some knowledge” of Azerbaijani and supplemented this with Google Translate.

They also accepted documents signed by Stan Gorin, a Latvian who had become notorious for selling his identity as a nominee company director, even though at that point there were hundreds of media reports detailing how his name had been used for illegal businesses, from weapons trafficking to pyramid schemes.

Perhaps most importantly, the relationship managers did not appear to pay much attention to the contracts that justified their clients’ transfers of millions of dollars, even when they were clearly absurd.

One high-risk client, Milecome Enterprises LLP, bought 10,500 one-gallon paint cans for an average price of over $1,000 each. Another supposedly sold a batch of metal pipes for $500 million, which would have added up to 344,820 metric tons — an unlikely amount, given that a full shipping container can hold only around 28. Inexplicable trades, especially those involving round numbers, are a classic sign of money laundering.

Another company, Riverlane LLP, was registered barely a month before it became Danske’s client. It had no website and only about 15,500 British pounds in cash assets, and declared its address at a location in Azerbaijan that didn’t appear on Google Maps.

Despite this, it almost immediately started moving huge amounts of money through the bank, mostly to other shell companies on the back of dubious contracts for the sale of electronics, textiles, building materials, and metals.

Auditors pointed out that many of these documents were nearly identical in form and content. In many cases, the buyer agreed to pay in advance for goods that would only be delivered after a month or more. One contract was signed a year before Riverlane was founded, while another was for the sale of an object whose name, the auditors said, was just gibberish: “the EP 70 KVA Sanay Puntasi 50cm.”

Danske often did not even bother to collect contracts at all, or check whether the trades actually took place.

“Danske Bank has not put in enough effort to determine where and when the goods would be delivered to the carrier and, moreover, whether the goods were carried at all,” the auditors wrote. “[F]or example, how and by what means were 282,138 tonnes of wire rod or workbenches valued at $250 million transported, and [were] they were transported at all.”

In just a year and a half, 65.7 million euros and over $1 billion passed through Riverlane’s accounts, an average of around $2.5 million for every working day — even though Danske never appeared to know who its customer was.

Newsletter

Related Articles

Saudi Press
0:00
0:00
Close
Dogfights in the Skies: Airbus on Track to Overtake Boeing and Claim Aviation Supremacy
Tim Cook Promises an AI Revolution at Apple: "One of the Most Significant Technologies of Our Generation"
Are AI Data Centres the Infrastructure of the Future or the Next Crisis?
Miles Worth Billions: How Airlines Generate Huge Profits
Zelenskyy Returns to White House Flanked by European Allies as Trump Pressures Land-Swap Deal with Putin
Beijing is moving into gold and other assets, diversifying away from the dollar
Cristiano Ronaldo Makes Surprise Stop at New Hong Kong Museum
Zelenskyy to Visit Washington after Trump–Putin Summit Yields No Agreement
High-Stakes Trump-Putin Summit on Ukraine Underway in Alaska
Iranian Protection Offers Chinese Vehicle Shipments a Cost Advantage over Japanese and Korean Makers
Saudi Arabia accelerates renewables to curb domestic oil use
Cristiano Ronaldo and Georgina Rodríguez announce engagement
Asia-Pacific dominates world’s busiest flight routes, with South Korea’s Jeju–Seoul corridor leading global rankings
Private Welsh island with 19th-century fort listed for sale at over £3 million
Sam Altman challenges Elon Musk with plans for Neuralink rival
Australia to Recognize the State of Palestine at UN Assembly
The Collapse of the Programmer Dream: AI Experts Now the Real High-Earners
Armenia and Azerbaijan to Sign US-Brokered Framework Agreement for Nakhchivan Corridor
British Labour Government Utilizes Counter-Terrorism Tools for Social Media Monitoring Against Legitimate Critics
WhatsApp Deletes 6.8 Million Scam Accounts Amid Rising Global Fraud
Nine people have been hospitalized and dozens of salmonella cases have been reported after an outbreak of infections linked to certain brands of pistachios and pistachio-containing products, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada
Texas Residents Face Water Restrictions While AI Data Centers Consume Millions of Gallons
Tariffs, AI, and the Shifting U.S. Macro Landscape: Navigating a New Economic Regime
India Rejects U.S. Tariff Threat, Defends Russian Oil Purchases
United States Establishes Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and Digital Asset Stockpile
Thousands of Private ChatGPT Conversations Accidentally Indexed by Google
China Tightens Mineral Controls, Curtailing Critical Inputs for Western Defence Contractors
OpenAI’s Bold Bet: Teaching AI to Think, Not Just Chat
BP’s Largest Oil and Gas Find in 25 Years Uncovered Offshore Brazil
JPMorgan and Coinbase Unveil Partnership to Let Chase Cardholders Buy Crypto Directly
British Tourist Dies Following Hair Transplant in Turkey, Police Investigate
WhatsApp Users Targeted in New Scam Involving Account Takeovers
Trump Deploys Nuclear Submarines After Threats from Former Russian President Medvedev
Germany’s Economic Breakdown and the Return of Militarization: From Industrial Collapse to a New Offensive Strategy
IMF Upgrades Global Growth Forecast as Weaker Dollar Supports Outlook
Politics is a good business: Barack Obama’s Reported Net Worth Growth, 1990–2025
"Crazy Thing": OpenAI's Sam Altman Warns Of AI Voice Fraud Crisis In Banking
Japanese Prime Minister Vows to Stay After Coalition Loses Upper House Majority
President Trump Diagnosed with Chronic Venous Insufficiency After Leg Swelling
Man Dies After Being Pulled Into MRI Machine Due to Metal Chain in New York Clinic
FIFA Pressured to Rethink World Cup Calendar Due to Climate Change
"Can You Hit Moscow?" Trump Asked Zelensky To Make Putin "Feel The Pain"
Nvidia Becomes World’s First Four‑Trillion‑Dollar Company Amid AI Boom
Iranian President Reportedly Injured During Israeli Strike on Secret Facility
Kurdistan Workers Party Takes Symbolic Step Towards Peace in Northern Iraq
BRICS Expands Membership with Indonesia and Ten New Partner Countries
Elon Musk Founds a Party Following a Poll on X: "You Wanted It – You Got It!"
AI Raises Alarms Over Long-Term Job Security
Saudi Arabia Maintains Ties with Iran Despite Israel Conflict
Russia Formally Recognizes Taliban Government in Afghanistan
×