Standard Chartered hit with $100 billion terror group money laundering allegations

FTSE 100 bank Standard Chartered was hit today with fresh whistleblower allegations that it was involved in transactions worth $100 billion, which financed some of the world’s most notorious terrorist groups.

 The claims were made in US court papers and relate to thousands of transactions between 2008 and 2013 and allege that sanctions against Iran were broken.

They include foreign exchange deals worth around $9.6 billion involving people or companies which the US government linked with funding Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

The whistleblowers claim that the transactions at the centre of the  latest allegations were found after they re-examined material previously sent to US authorities in 2012.

It centred on allegations that US was broken when by millions of dollars were moved for groups in Iran and other countries when under sanctions. Standard Chartered’s $227 million settlement with regulators allowed it to avoid criminal charges.

 One of the whistleblowers – Julian Knight, a former Standard Chartered executive – ran a transaction services unit there between 2009 and 2011. He now disputes a denial from US officials that the latest claims were shown in data he previously provided to them, covering around 500,000 transactions, which he says were missed by investigators. These are the basis of the renewed action against the bank.

Standard Chartered denies them, and says it is confident that the court will dismiss the claims. It has previously said business with Iran stopped in 2007.

The bank has paid out around $2 billion since 2012 over matters relating to sanctions violations. It was fined over $1 billion in 2019 for past conduct and control issues, which related to money laundering.. 

Then, its CEO Bill Winters said the bank “put these historical issues behind us”, and that they were not representative of the Standard Chartered I am proud to lead.”

The latest legal move is an attempt to overturn the US Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the case, which in effect ended the appeals process. The new legal move involves overturning the original judgement and it also accuses the US government of fraud relating to the evidence presented in it.