{"id":677845,"date":"2020-04-07T18:09:49","date_gmt":"2020-04-07T15:09:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/tr\/content\/?p=677845"},"modified":"2022-12-01T11:13:23","modified_gmt":"2022-12-01T08:13:23","slug":"us-indicts-turkish-halkbank-for-illegal-transfer-of-billions-of-dollars-to-iran","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2020\/04\/07\/us-indicts-turkish-halkbank-for-illegal-transfer-of-billions-of-dollars-to-iran\/","title":{"rendered":"US Indicts Turkish Halkbank for Illegal Transfer of Billions of dollars to Iran"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Halkbank, whose majority shareholder is the Turkish government, pleaded not guilty in New York on March 31, 2020, to criminal charges that it helped Iran illicitly transfer tens of billions in dollars and gold, wrote Aykan Erdemir and Philip Kowalski in an essay published on April 3 by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute based in Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n

On October 15, 2019, the Federal Southern District Court of New York accused Halkbank of \u201cfraud, money-laundering and sanctions offenses,\u201d alleging that Halkbank and its executives aided Iranian-Turkish gold trader Reza Zarrab in a \u201cmulti-billion dollar scheme to circumvent U.S. sanctions on Iran.\u201d<\/p>\n

Initially, Halkbank refused to appear in court \u201cclaiming that the criminal charges are beyond the U.S. court\u2019s jurisdiction,\u201d Erdemir and Kowalski wrote. However, when \u201cprosecutors proposed escalating contempt fines which could have totaled $1.8 billion after eight weeks,\u201d the bank agreed to respond to the court charges.<\/p>\n

Originally, the Turkish and Iranian officials had concocted a scheme to exchange gas for gold to circumvent the U.S. sanctions, by claiming that the gold was headed not to Iranian government entities but to Iran\u2019s \u201cprivate sector.\u201d Erdemir and Kowalski stated that \u201cthe scheme ultimately yielded the Iranian regime some $13 billion in Turkish gold between 2012 and 2013. Once the U.S. Congress introduced legislation to close the \u2018golden loophole\u2019 in 2013, Iran used Turkish front companies to issue invoices for fake transactions of food and medicine that fall under the humanitarian exception to U.S. sanctions. In one infamous case of over-invoicing, a Turkey-based luxury yacht company used Halkbank to sell nearly 5.2 tons of brown sugar to Iran\u2019s Bank Pasargad at the price of approximately $240 per pound.\u201d<\/p>\n

This scheme was first exposed in December 2013 by Turkish investigators who implicated then Prime-Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, several of his ministers and other senior officials, including Halkbank\u2019s managers. Erdogan shut down the probe by firing the police officials, prosecutors and judges!<\/strong><\/h2>\n

The scandal resurfaced in March 2016 when Iranian-Turkish ring-leader Reza Zarrab was arrested in Miami after he flew to Florida to visit Disney World with his family.<\/p>\n

In March 2017, U.S. authorities arrested Halkbank Deputy CEO Mehmet Hakan Atilla upon his arrival in New York. Zarrab pleaded guilty and agreed to testify in court against Atilla. Zarrab confessed that he had bribed senior Turkish ministers and top Halkbank executives. He even implicated Erdogan in the corruption scheme, stating that Erdogan had personally approved the illegal actions.<\/strong><\/h2>\n

\u201cHalkbank\u2019s Atilla received a 32-month prison sentence in May 2018, a significantly shorter one than prosecutors had originally sought,\u201d according to Erdemir and Kowalsky. \u201cAfter Atilla\u2019s return to Turkey, Erdogan rewarded the convicted sanctions buster by appointing him CEO of the Istanbul stock exchange, following the president\u2019s established pattern of rewarding other senior accomplices of Zarrab with cushy appointments.\u201d<\/p>\n

Erdogan personally appealed to Pres. Trump and other senior officials to block the court case of Halkbank, claiming that US courts have no right to try Turkish citizens. The Courthouse News Service reported that \u201cOne of Zarrab\u2019s shell companies, Royal Holding A.S., listed its address as a 35th floor unit in Trump Towers Istanbul. Before pleading guilty to money laundering, sanctions evasions and bribery, Zarrab retained Trump\u2019s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani to lead a campaign of shadow diplomacy that echoed the one in Ukraine. Shuttling between Turkey\u2019s capital of Ankara and the White House, Giuliani met with Erdogan, Trump, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and other senior U.S. and Turkish officials in an attempt to negotiate a prisoner swap. The New York Times reported that Tillerson resisted the White House pressure for a deal that would have effectively killed the Zarrab case.\u201d<\/p>\n

Erdogan\u2019s and Giuliani\u2019s efforts succeeded in stalling the prosecution for almost two years, but ultimately failed when the U.S. Attorney\u2019s Office for the Southern District of New York went forward with the charges last October.\u201d<\/p>\n

Senator Ron Wyden, the Senate Finance Committee\u2019s top Democrat, told Courthouse News Service: \u201cIt sure looked like Donald Trump was doing the bidding of Erdogan and Giuliani, and there were real questions about whether this was about getting Halkbank off the hook, even though there were allegations that they were orchestrating the largest sanctions evasion scheme in history.\u201d<\/p>\n

During Pres. Trump\u2019s Senate impeachment inquiry earlier in 2020, Senators Wyden, Robert Menendez and Sherrod Brown asked a joint question which was read aloud in the Senate by Chief Justice John Roberts: \u201cHas the president engaged in a pattern of conduct in which he places his personal and political interests on top of the national security interests of the United States?\u201d<\/p>\n

Wyden told Courthouse News Service: \u201cDonald Trump has significant financial interest in Turkey,\u201d referring to Trump Towers Istanbul. \u201cWe read regularly that his family has forged personal relationships with important Turkish officials.<\/strong> And so, you have to ask — which is what is part of our inquiry — whether the Trump policy toward Turkey is in a significant way colored by his personal and political interests and not the national security of the country.\u201d<\/h2>\n

If Halkbank is found guilty of violating U.S. sanctions, the court could impose a hefty penalty, regardless of the wishes of Pres. Trump.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 Halkbank, whose majority shareholder is the Turkish government, pleaded not guilty in New York on March 31, 2020, to criminal charges that it helped Iran illicitly transfer tens of billions in dollars and gold, wrote Aykan Erdemir and Philip Kowalski in an essay published on April 3 by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4101,"featured_media":774085,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3488],"tags":[7894],"class_list":["post-677845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-harut-sassounian","tag-halkbank"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4101"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=677845"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677845\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/774085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=677845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=677845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=677845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}