Whistleblower claims Standard Chartered broke more Iran sanctions

A former banker at Standard Chartered has accused the UK bank of carrying out more than $100bn of undetected transactions that breached sanctions against Iran.

The whistleblower claims relate to thousands of transactions made by StanChart between 2008 and 2013, even after the bank said it had discontinued all Iranian operations in 2007.

These transactions include those allegedly made to a number of front companies for Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as other entities linked to terrorist organisations.

StanChart has already paid fines totalling more than $1.7bn after admitting to breaching sanctions against a number of countries including Iran between 2001 and 2007, but had managed to avoid criminal charges after an intervention by David Cameron's government in 2012.

Julian Knight, who led a transaction services unit of StanChart from 2009 to 2011, said in a court filing on Tuesday that the US government had committed a "colossal fraud", by denying that he had provided sufficient information to intervene in his claim against the bank in 2012.

Knight, along with fellow whistleblow and currency trader Robert Marcellus, said they provided "damning evidence" to the Justice Department that StanChart had "facilitated many billions of dollars in banking transactions for Iran, numerous international terror groups, and the front companies for those groups".

Recent forensic analysis of data "hidden deep" in StanChart's electronic spreadsheets has now revealed previously undetected transactions carried out by the bank.

The whistleblowers claim that US authorities had failed to act on their evidence of additional wrongdoing, saying that the government had either lied that it had conducted a thorough investigation into the claims or had lied to conceal the truth.