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Bloomberg
Standard Chartered Plc’s transactions with Iran were worth tens of billions of dollars more than previously known, a whistleblower said in a lawsuit claiming the British bank actively pursued Iranian business in violation of US sanctions. The whistleblower, a bank executive who has not been named in court papers, was the bank’s global head of transaction banking and foreign exchange sales. He and another plaintiff — described only as an American currency trader — say StanChart handled more than $56 billion in transactions from 2009 to 2014, compared with $240 million cited by the Justice Department between 2007 and 2011 in an April settlement with the bank.
StanChart’s illicit trade with Iran has cost it more than $1.7 billion in penalties from prosecutions in 2012 and 2019 by the Justice Department and regulators. The whistleblower claims the bank’s wrongdoing was more extensive than the US alleged and seeks an order forcing it to pay an unspecified additional sum to the government.
The illicit transactions enabled Iran to aid US adversaries, the plaintiffs claim. “Beneath the green eye-shade complexity and deception of the international financial transactions involved in this case, the unavoidable fact is that [StanChart] used its resources to help terrorists kill and wound American, British, and other Coalition military personnel and thousands of innocent civilians,†they say in a complaint filed in Manhattan federal court.
The bank dismissed the lawsuit as “baseless,†noting that the US chose not to join the whistle-blower lawsuit.
“The US authorities have been aware of these claims for several years and have not seen fit to join this suit or include the claims as part of our resolution of historical sanctions compliance issues,†it said in a statement.
The lawsuit opens a window on a seven-year saga in which the StanChart executive secretly aided US prosecutors and regulators. Just a week after the first settlements between the bank and US authorities in 2012, the executives filed a sealed whistle-blower case and met with authorities to further develop their investigation, according to the complaint. That settlement covered $250 billion in transactions for the years from 2001 to 2007, but the whistle-blower says the true number was closer to $280 billion.
A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment. The FBI and Justice Department asked one of the plaintiffs to get more internal bank information. Two data sticks containing 79 files detailing thousands more illegal transactions were turned over to the FBI, according to the complaint. The whistle-blower’s lawsuit was dismissed in 2017 and refiled last year, and was unsealed this month.