The fallout from the Danske Bank money laundering scandal has rattled the European financial system as $235 billion that flowed through the bank's tiny Estonian branch - an amount that dwarfs the Baltic nation's GDP - has been deemed by the bank's auditors to be suspicious.

And while that might seem like a staggering sum and raise questions about how regulators on the Continent managed to overlook this, the full scale of the money laundering that took place in the Baltics is even more staggering. According to data provided to Bloomberg by the Estonian central bank in Tallinn, Estonian banks handled about 900 billion euros, or $1.04 trillion, in cross-border transactions - a figure that includes the highly suspect non-resident flows - between 2008 and 2015. The central bank added that it wouldn't be fair to say that all - or even the majority - of these non-resident flows would constitute money laundering. But then again, the notion that these foreign individuals and investors would choose to run such a large sum of their money through Estonia for explicitly legitimate purposes is difficult to swallow.

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