British bank known for sponsoring Liverpool FC accused of terror funding

Read this article in:

Amid ongoing fears in the UK around the politicization of banks, one of the largest financial institutions, Standard Chartered, has been accused in a U.S. court of funding worldwide terrorism, the BBC reported this week.

Standard Chartered, which sponsors the Liverpool soccer team to the tune of £50 million (almost $64 million) per season, previously avoided prosecution by the U.S. Justice Department over alleged money laundering, when former British Prime Minister David Cameron’s 2012 government intervened on its behalf.

New documents filed in a New York court last Friday, and seen by the BBC, claim thousands of transactions worth more than $100 billion were carried out by the bank from 2008 to 2013, in breach of sanctions against Iran.

An independent expert has also identified $9.6 billion in foreign exchange transactions with individuals and companies designated by the U.S. government as funding terror groups, including Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Iran is the world’s largest state sponsor of Islamist terrorism. Its proxy groups include Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. Iran reportedly orchestrated the Oct. 7 invasion and terror attack by Hamas terrorists who crossed the Gaza border into southern Israel, killing at least 1,200 and taking over 250 hostages.

Standard Chartered has admitted breaching sanctions against Iran and other countries, in 2012 and again in 2019, and has already reportedly paid more than $1.7 billion in financial penalties. However, the bank has not admitted to conducting transactions on behalf of ‘terrorist’ organizations.

The dubious foreign exchange transactions made by Standard Chartered in 2012 had not yet come to light, and the BBC made clear in its report that it was not suggesting that then-UK Chancellor George Osborne or then-PM Cameron had any knowledge of the recipients at the time.

In 2020, the BBC reported that Standard Chartered may have also moved money linked to terrorist financing, and in 2016, the bank itself filed a report after it suspected more than 900 illicit transactions by Jordan's Arab Bank.

It was later revealed that Arab Bank had provided services to Hamas in the early 2000s, during the Second Intifada. Although the 2014 verdict was later overturned, in 2015, Arab Bank reached a confidential settlement with 597 victims, or relatives of victims, of 22 Hamas attacks within Israel.