Standard Chartered helped Iran hide $250 bn: USThe US has accused Britain's
Standard Chartered bank of hiding 160 billion pounds (nearly $250
billion) of transfers that helped finance Iran's nuclear weapons programme.
New
York regulators said it was a "rogue institution" that broke sanctions
imposed on Iran and put profits ahead of global security and the law,
according to the Daily Mail Tuesday. The bank is accused of conspiring
with Tehran for almost 10 years.
It worked with three Iranian
banks suspected of being used by Tehran to finance its weapons
programmes, a US official report said.
US authorities suspect the
Iranian banks also funded terrorist and militant groups, including
Hezbollah, Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, according to the
Mail.
The New York State Department of Financial Services said
the London-based bank, which has 87,000 global staff with 2,000 of them
in London, had shown "obvious contempt" for US financial regulations.
Standard
Chartered was "motivated by greed" and had acted "without any regard
for legal, reputational, and national security consequences", the New
York watchdog said in the report.
The watchdog, which reviewed
over 30,000 pages of documents during its nine-month probe, said the
bank covered its tracks by removing information from wire transfer
messages used by US authorities to identify sanctioned countries.
The
Americans have threatened to revoke the licence of Standard Chartered
in the US, which makes most of its money in Asia and sponsors Liverpool
Football Club, according to the newspaper.
US sanctions against
Tehran date back to 1979 but were heightened following the Iranian
invasion of Iraq in 1980. Standard Chartered was one of the few banks to
emerge from the financial crisis intact.
On Monday, the banking
group said in a statement that it had shut down its Iran operation in
2007 and had no "physical presence" there.
"As reported
previously, the group is conducting a review of its historical US
sanctions compliance and is discussing that review with US enforcement
agencies and regulators," it said.
Standard Chartered helped Iran hide $250 bn: US
