Banks, Crime, EU – Baltic States, Financial Services, Legislation

The 150 bn U.S. dollar figure, which has been presented to the bank's board of directors, is a substantial sum considering that Estonia's entire banking system reports total deposits of 17 bn euros or 19 bn U.S. dollars, WSJ said.

Even in the context of Russia, the suspected source of some of the funds, the figure would represent more than a year's worth of the country's corporate profits. The flows would have stayed in the branch for only a short time before leaving Estonia, according to a person familiar with the investigation, so wouldn't fully show up in official statistics.

The bank's investigators haven't determined if all 150 billion dollars handled by non-Estonian entities should be deemed suspicious. But such a large flow of money suggests that roughly 8 bn U.S dollars of suspected money laundering transactions previously reported by a Danish newspaper could grow higher, the report said.

Danske Bank is now the target of criminal investigations in Denmark and Estonia amid allegations its Estonian operations were used to launder as much as nine billion dollars, mostly from Russia, between 2007 and 2015. The bank said this week it is close to publishing the results of an internal probe. Chief Executive Officer Thomas Borgen has publicly apologized for not acting sooner to stop the laundering.

According to Berlingske and the Financial Times, which cite the Promontory report commissioned by Danske, flows through the Estonian unit peaked at 30 bn U.S. dollars in 2013, a year before Deutsche started withdrawing its correspondent banking services. Analysts covering Danske Bank have pointed out that flows aren't the same as suspicious transactions and that the figure is therefore difficult to interpret.

Bloomberg News reported earlier on Friday that even while caught up in its own suspect transactions in Russia, Deutsche Bank AG may have helped curb the flow of illicit billions through Danske Bank's branch in Estonia. Deutsche Bank started rejecting individual dollar transactions going through Danske's branch in Tallinn in 2014, and completely withdrew its services a year later, according to a person familiar with the matter.