Summary

On 21 June 2022, Sweden's financial supervisor Finansinspektionen issued a formal remark (anmärkning) against Svea Bank AB and ordered it to pay an administrative fine of SEK 45,000,000. The regulator's stated ground was the bank's consumer-credit assessment practice: it had breached sections 6 and 12 of the Consumer Credit Act (konsumentkreditlagen 2010:1846) by failing to obtain complete debt data and ignoring housing costs, existing credit commitments and family expenses. Crucially, Finansinspektionen acted against Svea Bank as the entity that had taken over Svea Ekonomi's obligations following the downstream merger effective 3 January 2022, in which the parent Svea Ekonomi AB (org.nr 556489-2924) merged into its subsidiary Svea Bank AB (publ), org.nr 556158-7634, and was dissolved [https://www.svea.com/sv-se/om-oss/fusion].

The legal track then produced a textbook demonstration of durable remedy. Svea Bank appealed, and the Stockholm Administrative Court revoked Finansinspektionen's decision on 14 November 2023 (case 15051-22), holding that the regulator bears the burden of proof in administrative-penalty matters. Finansinspektionen appealed; on 25 September 2024 the Stockholm Administrative Court of Appeal (case 7294-23) reinstated the decision in full, finding the credit-assessment breach was not minor and that the fine — set against a statutory maximum of roughly SEK 440 million, ten percent of group turnover — was proportionate. The Supreme Administrative Court declined to refer a question to the EU Court of Justice and refused leave to appeal, so the appellate judgment stands [https://www.fi.se/contentassets/d7f2a5aa190e468190ade1aaf1562c2d/stockholm-kr-7294-23-dom-2024-09-25.pdf].

That is what a hardened remedy looks like: a named legal entity, a quantified sanction, an external appellate hierarchy, and a final, enforceable outcome. On the internet number-resource side of the same corporate family, the record looks very different.

The RIPE aut-num for AS211899, as-name "SVEA", is registered to Svea Bank AB under ORG-SBA155-RIPE, allocated 2 February 2021, sponsored by ORG-TA44-RIPE (Tele2/SWIPNET), with the role object SEAR1-RIPE as abuse contact [https://apps.db.ripe.net/db-web-ui/query?searchtext=AS211899]. But the admin-c and tech-c is the person object JE4899-RIPE — Jorgen Edstrom — whose address field still reads "Svea Ekonomi AB", the dissolved predecessor. Meanwhile the block the AS originates, the PI assignment 193.105.138.0/24 (netname SVEA-EKONOMI-SE, descr "Svea Ekonomi AB"), is registered under yet another organisation, Svea Billing Services AB (ORG-SBSA5-RIPE), whose rendered abuse comment points to a mailbox belonging to a third-party network operator, apparently a remnant of the original sponsoring LIR arrangement. Aggregators even disagree on which contact is operative: some render a personal Svea organisation e-mail for AS211899 rather than the SEAR1-RIPE role mailbox [http://whois.ipip.net/AS211899/193.105.138.0/24].

These are registry facts, and they describe registered contact records — not staffed mailboxes. No source retrieved for this article establishes who, if anyone, reads mail sent to SEAR1-RIPE, to the Verizon mailbox, or to the abuse contact of the separately named Svea Hosting AB (AS41634), whose corporate relationship to Svea Bank AB is not established by any retrieved source [http://whois.ipip.net/AS211899]. No post-merger repair of the stale JE4899-RIPE address or the third-party Verizon mailbox is documented anywhere in the public record examined here.

What would distinguish a repair from a rename is concrete and checkable: a dated registry change history consolidating JE4899-RIPE, ORG-SBSA5-RIPE and SEAR1-RIPE under a single post-merger legal entity with a matching abuse-c; independent test reports to each mailbox with acknowledged tickets and named responders; a published abuse SLA attributable to Svea Bank AB; and removal of the third-party Verizon mailbox from the Svea block. None of that evidence exists in the sources available.

Where Finansinspektionen's sanction was hardened by appellate review, the number-resource contact record has simply been left standing on names the merger dissolved — and no regulator, court or registry process examined here connects the SEK 45 million accountability outcome to that contact accuracy.

Sources

  1. https://apps.db.ripe.net/db-web-ui/query?searchtext=AS211899
  2. http://whois.ipip.net/AS211899
  3. https://ipgeolocation.io/browse/asn/AS211899
  4. http://whois.ipip.net/AS211899/193.105.138.0/24
  5. https://ipinfo.io/AS211899/193.105.138.0/24
  6. https://ipinfo.io/193.105.138.1
  7. https://ipgeolocation.io/browse/asn/AS41634
  8. https://svea.net/peering
  9. https://www.fi.se/sv/publicerat/sanktioner/finansiella-foretag/2022/svea-bank-far-anmarkning-och-sanktionsavgift/
  10. https://www.fi.se/contentassets/d7f2a5aa190e468190ade1aaf1562c2d/beslut-svea-bank.pdf
  11. https://www.fi.se/contentassets/d7f2a5aa190e468190ade1aaf1562c2d/stockholm-fr-15051-22-dom-2023-11-14.pdf
  12. https://www.fi.se/contentassets/d7f2a5aa190e468190ade1aaf1562c2d/stockholm-kr-7294-23-dom-2024-09-25.pdf
  13. https://www.fi.se/contentassets/d7f2a5aa190e468190ade1aaf1562c2d/beslut-hfd-svea-bank.pdf
  14. https://www.svea.com/sv-se/om-oss/fusion
  15. https://www.svea.com/globalassets/sweden/om-oss/fusion/fusionsbrev_svea-ekonomi_eng_210907.pdf
  16. https://statsskoleverket.se/riipe/AS211899