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MONEY LAUNDERING

Ex-Guatamalan leader’s Swiss assets frozen

A Guatemalan court has ordered the freezing of assets held by ex-president Alfonso Portillo in France, Switzerland and Luxembourg, the nation's top prosecutor says.

Ex-Guatamalan leader's Swiss assets frozen
Alfonso Portillo, ex-Guatamalan president. Photo: OAS

Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz said on Monday that Portillo, who was in power from 2000-2004 and is currently being held in the United States for money laundering, had frozen accounts totalling €2.8 million in those three countries.

On May 24th, Guatemala extradited Portillo to the United States to face charges of laundering $70 million.
   
Portillo, 61, had been fighting extradition since it was approved by then president Alvaro Colom in 2011.
   
Following a request from a New York court, he was arrested in January 2010 as he was trying to flee to Belize. Portillo has described the case against him as "political persecution."
   
Portillo was indicted by a US grand jury on charges of embezzling tens of millions of dollars of public funds — including $1.5 million intended for Guatemalan school children —  and laundering the money through US and European
banks.
 
 In 2011, a Guatemalan court acquitted Portillo and two of his former ministers of conspiring to embezzle $15 million from the defense ministry in 2001.
   
His acquittal was confirmed by an appeals court in April.

The accounts opened by Portillo in the names of his daughter and late wife are at UBS Luxembourg, Audi Suisse in Switzerland and BBVA in France.

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MONEY LAUNDERING

US files lawsuit against scandal-hit Danske Bank

The United States and a US pension fund have filed a claim in a Danish court seeking more than $1.6 million for lost investments following a money laundering scandal that engulfed Danske Bank, their lawyer confirmed.

US files lawsuit against scandal-hit Danske Bank
Photo: Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen/Reuters/Ritzau Scanpix

“A lawsuit was filed in September against Danske Bank and its former CEO Thomas Borgen,” lawyer Thomas Donatzky said on Tuesday, adding that he could not provide any details.

The Danish financial daily Børsen, which first reported on the lawsuit, said the US government and pension fund were seeking 10 million kroner (1.3 million euros) due to losses suffered after shares in Danske Bank plunged in 2018 when the bank got caught up in huge money laundering schemes.

An investigation carried out by an outside law firm for the bank found that it could not account for the origin of more than $220 billion that flowed through its Estonian branch from 2007 to 2015, much of which was suspected to have come from Russia.

Borgen resigned in the wake of the scandal and the bank closed its operations in the Baltic States and Russia.

“The contingent liabilities related to civil shareholder claims and related amount described in today’s media coverage is part of the disclosure in our Annual Report for 2020,” Danske Bank said in a statement.

The report put the total of such claims at 12.4 billion kroner at the end of 2020. 

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