LONDON — The Bank of England criticized New York financial regulators Wednesday for unilaterally accusing Standard Chartered of illegally laundering oil money for Iran, while the chief executive of the embattled London bank denied claims of systematic sanctions-busting.
On Monday, the New York State Department of Financial Services accused Standard Chartered of laundering $250 billion of Iranian oil money over a decade in defiance of an American order prohibiting such transactions. The bank admits violations totaling $14 million.
Standard Chartered chief executive, Peter Sands, rejected the U.S. investigators’ central accusation that bank officials had conspired with Iran to evade U.S. sanctions by systematically removing Iranian identification from wire transfers of Iranian cash cleared through its New York office.
Sands offered a partial apology in a conference call with journalists, admitting the bank had violated U.S. sanctions law in about 300 transactions from 2001 to 2007. But he billed these as errors rather than calculated fraud.
New York authorities estimate the true scale of deceptive transactions at 60,000 and include deals as recent as 2010.
Earlier, responding to questions at a news conference, Bank of England Governor Mervyn King suggested that New York authorities had moved too quickly. He contrasted the New York announcement on Standard Chartered with the coordinated approach taken by American and British agencies to investigate Barclays’ manipulation of the London interbank offered rate, a key interest-rate index known as Libor.
