British bank Standard Chartered is facing fresh allegations that it facilitated billions of dollars worth of banking transactions for Iran and terrorist groups, in new court documents filed in the US.
Whistleblowers, including ex-bank executive Julian Knight, are pushing to reopen a legal case against the bank in the US, armed with what they assert is fresh evidence of sanction breaches. The bank, which has a strong presence in Asia despite being listed in London, has dismissed the claims as "fabricated" and based on "false allegations".
The bank avoided prosecution in the US in 2012 when the UK Government intervened on its behalf, but it has faced a long-running court battle in the years since. The whistleblowers are now accusing the US government of committing a “colossal fraud on this court” over the thoroughness of its investigation into the alleged sanctions violations in 2012 and 2013.
Freshly filed court papers in New York unveil new charges based on freshly-analysed data, suggesting Standard Chartered "facilitated many billions of dollars in banking transactions for Iran, numerous international terror groups, and the front companies for those groups". It names Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban, and al Qaida among the groups the bank allegedly handled payments for.
The whistleblowers, who have filed under the name as Brutus Trading, claim that they have unearthed $100billion (£77.4billion) worth of transactions between Standard Chartered and Iranian-related clients.
“With the assistance of forensic data analysis, Brutus was only recently able to reveal or ‘decloak’ countless illegal transactions that were hidden deep in the bank’s electronic spreadsheets, which Brutus gave to the government,” the document filed on Friday read. “One cannot overstate the significance of that discovery.” They now want to reverse the previous dismissal of their claims and revive the lawsuit.
Standard Chartered said the filings are “another attempt to use fabricated claims against the bank, following previous unsuccessful attempts”. A spokesman said: “The false allegations underpinning it have been thoroughly discredited by the US authorities who undertook a comprehensive investigation into the claims and said they were ‘meritless’ and did not show any violations of US sanctions. We are confident the courts will reject these claims, as they have already done repeatedly.”
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