Danske Bank fined €1.82m by Central Bank for money laundering breaches

Reuters

The Central Bank has reprimanded and fined Danske Bank for three breaches of the State's money laundering and terrorist financing laws.

The Danish bank was fined €1.82 million for three breaches stemming from a failure to ensure that its automated transaction monitoring system monitored the transactions of certain categories of Irish customers, for a period of almost nine years, between 2010 and 2019.

The Central Bank found in its investigation that Danske did not update a historic automated transaction monitoring system, which rolled out in the Irish branch in 2006, when the Criminal Justice (Money Laundering & Terrorist Financing) Act 2010 came into force in the State.

“This led to the erroneous exclusion of certain categories of customers from transaction monitoring, including some customers rated by Danske as high and medium risk,” the regulator said, adding that the shortcomings caused three breaches of the law.

It was only in October 2018, when the Irish branch identified the issue, that steps were taken to rectify it. The Central Bank was not informed until February 2019, a month before the matter was finally resolved.

The Copenhagen-based group entered the Republic in 2005 with the purchase of National Irish Bank. While it pulled out of Irish retail banking in 2013, it remained in the corporate and institutional market.