Before the murder, Deputy Chairman of the Central Bank Andrei Kozlov helped the Swedish bank deal with money laundering • The Bell • RIMA

Before the murder, Deputy Chairman of the Central Bank Andrei Kozlov helped the Swedish bank deal with money laundering

The amount of money that could be laundered through the divisions of the Swedish bank SEB in the Baltic countries turned out to be many times less than that of the other two defendants in the “laundry” scandal, Danske and Swedbank, writes Bloomberg . SEB CEO Johan Torgeby, in a conversation with the publication, explained this by saying that in 2006 the bank began an active fight against laundering after a warning from Andrey Kozlov, then first deputy chairman of the Central Bank. A few months later, Kozlov was killed.

SEB has become another Scandinavian bank caught in the Russian money scandal. On Wednesday, Swedish television channel SVT reported that more than a hundred SEB clients may have been laundering money through its subsidiaries in Estonia and other Baltic countries.

Part of the money transferred through the Baltic branches is connected with the Magnitsky case. In total, about $93 billion passed through the Estonian branch of the bank in 2005-2018.
For comparison, about $220 billion passed through the Estonian branch of Danske in 2007–2015, and about $155 billion through the Swedbank branch.

The role of Kozlov. In 2006, during a trip to Estonia, the deputy chairman of the Russian Central Bank, Andrey Kozlov, warned the top management of SEB that "the Baltic region was being used as a channel for money laundering."

Inspections immediately began at SEB, and three days later the bank began working in cooperation with the police, Bloomberg quoted Torbega as saying.
The banker called the warning very important to minimize the risks of money laundering through SEB and added that the bank is still studying the reports of 2005 and 2006 and understand what happened then.
The main result of the struggle was a decrease in the flow of money from non-residents after 2006, writes Bloomberg, but the proportion of the reduction in such flows is not specified.

Kozlov's murder. A few months after the trip to Estonia, Kozlov and his driver were shot dead in Moscow as he was returning from a football match. In 2008, the financier Alexei Frenkel was recognized as the customer of the murder. He was sentenced to 19 years in a strict regime colony.