Now we'll be damned if we don't make sure to convince the Supreme Court that Birgitte Bonnesen is innocent, says Samuelsson, who has not yet spoken to his client.
Bonnesen was fired from Swedbank after SVT's "Uppdrag granskning" in 2019 revealed that the major bank may have been used for money laundering in the Baltics. In 2022, she was prosecuted for spreading misleading information about the bank's measures against money laundering in Estonia. She was acquitted in the district court but was convicted in the court of appeal for gross fraud last autumn.
The court of appeal concluded that the Swedbank CEO had provided misleading information when she was interviewed by Svenska Dagbladet and TT in connection with the bank's release of its third quarterly report on October 23, 2018.
Misleading message
The court considered that she then conveyed a misleading message that there were no suspected money laundering links to Danske Bank's operations in Estonia. The information she provided was also considered to have been intended to influence the assessment of Swedbank in economic terms and thereby cause damage.
The sentence was set to one year and three months in prison, which she said she did not accept.
I do not accept being convicted of something I have not done and will do everything in my power to have the verdict overturned, she said in an interview with Dagens Juridik during the autumn.
New trial
And now nearly ten months after the court of appeal's verdict, the Supreme Court has decided that the case will also be tried in the final instance.
The trial will be conducted on the basis that it is proven that Swedbank Compliance "at group level had indications" that between 2007-2015 there were suspicions of money laundering between customers in the Estonian operations and counterpart customers in Danske Bank's operations in Estonia, that on October 23, 2018, there was information about "serious deficiencies and neglect" in the subsidiary's work against money laundering – and that Bonnesen was aware of all this.
"This means that the Supreme Court will take a position on whether the statements made by B.B. have been misleading in the sense intended by the offense of fraud", writes the Supreme Court in a press release.
