LIVERPOOL FC shirt sponsor Standard Chartered has settled its dispute with American financial regulators over sanctions-busting dealings with Iran, with a payment of around £215m.
The Asia-facing bank said it had reached final settlements with the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Department of Justice and the New York County District Attorney’s Office regarding historical sanctions compliance and US dollar payment practices between 2001 and 2007.
It signals the conclusion of a three-year investigation which emerged in August when the New York State Department of Financial Services branded the bank a “rogue institution” over claims of breaking sanctions.
Standard Chartered paid a fine of about £220m to the New York regulator which, it admitted last week, will affect profit levels for the current year.
The latest and final settlement with US regulators will be paid in cash in the second half of its 2012 financial year.
The bank said OFAC found that “while SCB’s omission of information affected approximately 60,000 payments related to Iran totalling $250bn, the vast majority of those transactions do not appear to have been violations of the Iranian Transactions Regulations”.
Over the entire period from 2001 to the end of 2007, it found that approximately $24m of transactions processed on behalf of Iranian parties and a total of $109m on behalf other sanctioned entities from other countries (Burma, Sudan and Libya) appeared to be in violation of sanctions laws.
Over the same period, SCB New York processed $139 trillion in US dollar payments.
The Bank ceased its Iranian US dollar payments business in late 2006 and in the following year stopped transacting any new business with Iranian entities, well before such actions were required by US authorities.
