The Supreme Court will now take a position on whether the statements made by Birgitte Bonnesen as CEO of Swedbank were misleading "in the manner referred to in the offense of fraud", writes the Supreme Court in a press release.
Now we damn well will make sure to convince the Supreme Court that Birgitte Bonnesen is innocent, says Per E Samuelsson.
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.
Convicted in the Court of Appeal
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 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.
According to the court, she 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 harm.
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 judgment overturned, she said in an interview with Dagens Juridik during the autumn.
Bonnesen was aware of deficiencies
Now almost ten months later, she gets a new chance, when the Supreme Court has decided to take up the case. The new trial will, however, be made with the starting point that three facts are proven, emphasizes the court:
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 counterparties in Danske Bank's operations in Estonia, that at the time of Bonnesen's interviews with Svenska Dagbladet and TT there was information about "serious deficiencies and neglect" in the subsidiary's work against money laundering, and that Bonnesen was aware of all this.
