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harmed our national security by deliberately providing Iranians with coveted access to the U.S. economy,” Washington, D.C., US Attorney Jessie Liu said. “The circumstances that led to today’s resolutions are completely unacceptable”, Standard Chartered Group Chief Executive Bill Winters said in a statement. He added that they were “not representative” of the bank today. The agreements conclude a five-year-old investigation that started into Standard Chartered’s banking for Iran-controlled entities in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates
The latest penalty is a tally of fines and forfeitures imposed by US Department of Justice, the US Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, the New York County District Attorney’s Office, the New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS), and the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).
The FCA imposed a GBP102mn fine ($134mn) on the bank for its control failures. It noted Standard Chartered’s lax controls in opening an account with 3 million UAE dirham in cash in a suitcase (just over GBP500,000) and allowing a customer to export a product with potential military applications to war zones.
New York’s DFS said the misconduct involved $600mn in illegal dollar transactions between 2008 and 2014 that moved through the state from the bank’s London and Dubai offices.
After bank employees found that dozens of clients used an internet platform to access US dollar accounts from Iran, bank compliance officers failed to take steps to ensure the transactions were blocked, New York’s regulator said, according to Reuters.
Payments from Iran through a fax in the Dubai branch also were not halted, and a manager told an Iranian front company how to evade detection by changing its name and opening a new account, the regulator said.
Standard Chartered had an office on the Iranian free trade zone island of Kish in the Persian Gulf.
The bank continued to keep banking relations open with Iran via the Central Bank of Iran (CBI). It announced in 2017 that Standard Chartered along with another four foreign banks had been granted banking licences to operate in Iran.
The bank reportedly had issues discerning when certain individuals were Iranian passport holders and who had Persian family names, considering the large diaspora of Iranians numbering in the tens of millions abroad after an internal review was sought to determine the origins of people, UANI reported.
8.2 Central Bank policy
Iran’s central bank ready to deploy digital rationing system
A digital rationing system for basic goods including meat and poultry has been prepared by the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) in response to the government's policy of supplying essential goods through the local banking system with the use of bank cards, Mehr News Agency reported on April 11.
The CBI had previously announced it was moving forward with the plan to boost people’s access to essential meat products following the collapse in the value of the Iranian rial (IRR), by as much as 70% against the USD in comparison to where it stood at the start of last year, following the Trump administration’s introduction of the toughest ever sanctions regime aimed by the US against Tehran.
In conjunction with the Ministry of Mining, Trade and Agriculture, the CBI digital payment system will allow low-income families to access meat through a
29 IRAN Country Report May 2019 www.intellinews.com