Bloomberg reports that the plaintiffs said that after they obtained the judgment in 2007, the bank conspired with 'Iran and its agents to hide Iran’s assets from its judgment creditors'.
'Those unlawful actions are part and parcel of Iran’s longstanding, determined efforts to evade collection of the judgment and other judgments obtained by the victims of Iran’s ongoing terror campaign', the plaintiffs said in the suit, filed yesterday in U.S. District Court in New York.
Julie Gibson, a spokeswoman for Standard Chartered, declined to comment on the suit. Bank officials said Standard Chartered stopped its Iranian payments business.
In the meantime, BusinessWeek reports that Standard Chartered may have to pay as much as three times more than the $340m it was fined by a New York regulator to settle all the probes by regulators into its transactions for Iranian clients.
The bank may have to disburse a total of $1bn as regulators including the U.S. Treasury, Federal Reserve, Justice Department and Manhattan District Attorney negotiate settlements with the bank, according to Simon Morris, a regulatory lawyer at CMS Cameron McKenna in London. Cormac Leech, an analyst at Liberum Capital, put the total cost at $700m.
image: © bloomsberries
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