LONDON, England – Standard Chartered, one of the UK’s largest banks, is accused to have conducted billions of dollars in transactions for funders of terrorist groups, according to new US court documents.
The bank had previously avoided prosecution for money laundering due to intervention by Lord Cameron’s Government in 2012.
Documents filed in a New York court claim that from 2008 to 2013, the bank carried out thousands of transactions totaling over $100 billion in violation of sanctions against Iran.
According to BBC, an independent expert identified $9.6 billion in foreign exchange transactions involving individuals and entities designated by the US as funding terrorist organizations, including Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban.
Standard Chartered disputes these allegations, stating that the whistleblowers’ claims had been thoroughly discredited by US authorities.
The bank had been accused of falsifying transaction data on the international payment system Swift to move billions of dollars through its New York branch on behalf of sanctioned entities such as the Central Bank of Iran.
In 2012, then-Chancellor George Osborne intervened on the bank’s behalf, and the US Department of Justice later decided not to prosecute the bank. However, the transactions detailed in the new court filings had not been revealed at that time.
The bank has previously admitted to breaching sanctions against Iran and other countries in 2012 and 2019, paying fines exceeding $1.7 billion. However, it has not admitted to conducting transactions for terrorist organizations.
The transactions, which were first brought to the attention of US authorities in 2012 by whistleblowers, remained hidden in confidential bank spreadsheets.
These spreadsheets were analyzed by David Scantling, an expert in counter-terrorist financing, who stated that the transactions were “cloaked” but could be extracted using well-known analytical techniques.
Scantling’s analysis revealed more than half a million transactions from 2008 to 2013 involving Iranian banks and companies, as well as Middle Eastern money exchanges financing designated terrorist organizations.
These transactions included those of a Pakistani fertilizer company linked to the Taliban and a Gambian front company owned by a Hezbollah financier.
Daniel Alter, former general counsel at the New York Department of Financial Services, described the new disclosures as “shocking” and significantly worse than what the bank had admitted in 2012.
In 2019, Standard Chartered agreed to a further deferred prosecution agreement and paid an additional $1.1 billion in fines related to transactions between 2007 and 2011.
Both the FBI and the US Department of Justice have declined to comment on the new allegations.
Neither Lord Cameron nor Mr. Osborne provided comments.
Standard Chartered remains confident that the courts will dismiss the claims, asserting that US authorities previously deemed the whistleblowers’ allegations as meritless.
