Danske Bank apologises for scandal in ‘challenging year’

Danske Bank has again apologised over its failure to monitor around €200bn in suspicious transactions that went through its Estonia branch over many years, as the lender posted a sharply lower net profit of 15bn Danish krone (€2bn) for 2018, in what it described as a “challenging year”.

The Danish lender —which is a significant mortgage and business lender in the North and is running down a once substantial mortgage operation in the Republic — has been enveloped by the money laundering scandal after admitting to regulators and government investigators over its failings to monitor and report that billions of euro transactions passed through its Estonian bank into Europe from Russia and other former Soviet republics.