Sweden's financial watchdog on Thursday imposed another heavy fine in the scandal of money laundering of Nordic banks in the Baltic countries, sentencing the Swedish bank SEB to a fine of one billion Swedish kronor, or more than 95 million euros.

Following its investigation, the Swedish Finance Inspectorate (FI) concluded that SEB had "not sufficiently identified the risk of money laundering in its Baltic operations" and had had "shortcomings in its governance and control of the anti-money laundering measures of its subsidiaries. Baltic banks".

After the fall of the USSR, the three Baltic countries became a country of cocagne for The Nordic banks, and especially the Swedish ones, which opened very profitable subsidiaries there. But it has emerged in recent years that they have turned too much of a blind eye to the origins of some funds suspected of illegal origins, against a backdrop of the emergence of local and Russian mafia networks.

The case had first splashed the Danish bank Danske Bank, pushing its boss Thomas Borgen to resign in September 2018. The institution had acknowledged that funds amounting to nearly 250 million euros that had passed through its Estonian subsidiary between 2007 and 2015 were "suspicious". The Nordic bank Nordea was also involved in the scandal.

The investigation against SEB was coordinated with the Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian supervisory authorities.

According to FI, the bank's Estonian subsidiary also received a call to order and a fine in the country "for violating local anti-money laundering requirements". The bank's other Baltic subsidiaries also received a sanction in Latvia and "orders to correct shortcomings" in Lithuania, FI reported.

For the same reasons, the Swedish authorities fined its competitor Swedbank some €360 million in March  .