 |
| Standard Chartered has been accused of undermining US sanctions against Iran |
Standard
Chartered bank illegally "schemed" with Iran to launder as much as
$250bn (£161bn) for nearly a decade, a US regulator says.
The NewYork State Department of Financial Services said that the bank hid 60,000
secret transactions for "Iranian financial institutions" that were
subject to US economic sanctions.
It labelled
Standard Chartered a "rogue institution".
HSBC was
recently accused by the US Senate of allowing money laundering.
HSBC has
set aside $700m to deal with any fines and penalties arising from those
allegations - making the Standard Chartered situation far larger.
The New
York State Department of Financial Services threatened to revoke the licence of
the US unit of Standard Chartered, which is headquartered in London but makes
most of its money in Asia.
Other
schemes found
The
regulator said that its nine-month probe, which involved looking through more
than 30,000 pages of documents, including internal Standard Chartered Bank
(SCB) emails, showed that the bank reaped "hundreds of millions of dollars
in fees".
"SCB's
actions left the US financial system vulnerable to terrorists, weapons dealers,
drug kingpins and corrupt regimes, and deprived law enforcement investigators
of crucial information used to track all manner of criminal activity," it
said.
The probe
also said that it uncovered evidence with respect to what are apparently
similar schemes to conduct business with other countries under sanctions -
Libya, Myanmar and Sudan.
"Investigation
of these additional matters is ongoing," it added.
In the
27-page complaint, the New York State Department of Financial Services said
that Standard Chartered showed "obvious contempt for US banking
regulations" and pointed to an email reply from a bank executive director
to a New York branch officer.
"Who
are you [Americans] to tell us, the rest of the world, that we're not going to
deal with Iranians," the complaint quotes the director as saying.
Standard
Chartered said: "The group is conducting a review of its historical US
sanctions compliance and is discussing that review with US enforcement agencies
and regulators.
"The
group cannot predict when this review and these discussions will be completed
or what the outcome will be."
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.