A former Danske Bank executive at the heart of a €200bn moneylaundering scandal in Estonia has been found dead in an apparent suicide, according to local police.
Police said on Wednesday that after two days of searching for Aivar Rehe, who led Danske Bank in Estonia from 2006 until 2015, they had found his body at his home in the capital of Tallinn.
Danske Bank’s Estonian branch is at the centre of one of the largest-ever money-laundering scandals, with €200bn of suspicious money flowing through it from countries including Russia, Moldova and Azerbaijan for more than a decade.
The scandal has led to criminal probes against the bank and senior executives in the US, Denmark, Estonia and France. Estonian prosecutors said on Tuesday that Rehe was not a suspect in their investigation.
Currently, 10 former employees, mostly lower-ranking ones, are suspects in the Estonian investigation while Danish prosecutors have charged several senior managers in Copenhagen including the bank’s former chief executive and chief financial officer, Thomas Borgen and Henrik Ramlau-hansen.
Police declined to give further details, but people familiar with the investigation said there were no doubts that the 56-year-old had taken his own life.
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Rehe had told local media that Danske’s anti-money laundering measures and customer checks were sufficient but that he felt responsible for the scandal. “I’ve run the bank for 10 years and these were my people,” he told Postimees newspaper in March.
Rehe had worked as directorgeneral of the tax and customs authority before joining an Estonian bank that after several takeovers became Danske’s local branch in 2007.
Estonian financial regulators first forced Danske to close its business serving non- resident customers in 2015, before shutting the entire operations of Denmark’s largest bank in the country.
The scandal has cost Danske more than 60 per cent of its market capitalisation and led to the ousting of both its chief executive and chairman.
Danske has admitted that most of the € 200bn in non- resident money that flowed through its Estonian branch between 2007 and 2015 was “suspicious” but that it cannot calculate how much was down to actual money laundering. The US Securities and Exchange Commission and Department of Justice are both investigating Danske in probes expected to last several years.
