A Turkish bank defies US law and demands diplomatic immunity
DIPLOMATIC IMMUNITY?
Anyone who has seen “Lethal Weapon 2” will be aware of the tremendous power of diplomatic status when it comes to getting away with crime. Had Danny Glover not been prepared to unilaterally revoke Joss Ackland’s diplomatic immunity by shooting him in the head from 50 yards away while Mel Gibson lay on the ground and grimaced, the apartheid-era South African baddy would have got away scot-free.
And if one crooked diplomat at a U.S.-based consulate could single-handedly create a crime wave in Los Angeles back in 1989, imagine what a whole bank could do these days. Which was why the U.S. Department of Justice acted to stop it from happening.
- “Halkbank, a Turkish financial institution whose majority shareholder is the government of Turkey, willfully engaged in deceptive activities designed to evade U.S. sanctions against Iran,” said FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge William F. Sweeney Jr. back in 2019. “Halkbank illegally facilitated the illicit transfer of billions of dollars to benefit Iran, and for far too long the bank and its leaders willfully deceived the United States to shield their actions from scrutiny. That deception ends today. The FBI will aggressively pursue those who intentionally violate U.S. sanctions laws and attempt to undercut our national security.”
The allegations leveled by the Department of Justice were pretty extraordinary. For years, high-ranking officials in Ankara allegedly conspired with their counterparts in Iran to move billions of dollars’ worth of oil revenue via Halkbank, which retained its correspondent banking relationships in New York, despite stringent U.S. sanctions barring Iranians from accessing dollars.
Considering that a senior Halkbank manager was jailed in New York in 2018 for being involved in precisely these crimes (and another participant had pleaded guilty), it looked like a pretty open and shut case. And considering what’s happened to other financial institutions — yes, BNP Paribas faced a penalty of almost $9 billion — found to have helped Iranians and others access international markets when the American government didn’t want them to, it looked like it could prove expensive for Halkbank.