Danske Bank shareholders look to brighter future after purge of board

Bloomberg

Danske Bank A/S shareholders, who’ve lost more than 40 percent on their investment this year, are looking to a brighter future after the lender took another step to purge its leadership.
Denmark’s largest bank replaced its chairman, following October’s ouster of its chief executive officer, as it seeks to atone for its role in one of Europe’s biggest money laundering scandals.
“We’re on the right track,” Jens Munch Holst, the CEO of shareholder MP Pension, said on the sidelines of the extraordinary general meeting in Copenhagen. “We’ll likely pay more attention to the share and stay closer to the management and talk more to them then we would in other situations.”
At the EGM, Danske’s shareholders picked Karsten Dybvad, an economist who heads Denmark’s biggest industry association, as chairman. Dybvad “is completely different” from the departing Ole Andersen, said Anton Grau Larsen, co-author of a comprehensive study of Denmark’s power elite that ranked Dybvad as number two.
“We hope Dybvad will aid our dialogue with authorities which we expect will take up considerable time in the coming years,” Robert Maersk Uggla, the head of A.P. Moller Holding, which owns about one-fifth of Danske, said at the EGM. Uggla also said he hopes that the board and the management now will “establish Danske Bank as the best bank in the Nordic region for society, clients and shareholders.”
Danske has admitted that much of about $230 billion that flowed through a tiny Estonian unit in 2007-2015 was probably illicit in origin. Whistle-blower testimony suggests the unit became a go-to money-laundering shop for clients from the former Soviet Union eager to shovel their wealth into the West.