Wells Fargo will pay $97.8 million for helping facilitate more than 100 financial transactions, violating U.S. sanctions against Iran, Syria, and Sudan. The Treasury and the Federal Reserve Board, say subsidiary of Wells Fargo and its predecessor, Wachovia Bank, provided a European bank with financial software, called Eximbills, that was used to process 124 transactions with blacklisted entities and the transactions totaled about $532 million.
According to the Treasury, a member of Well Fargo’s legal team raised concerns and recognized “potential parallels” to the violations in ING Bank’s settlement in 2012 in which the DOJ asserted ING Bank violated U.S. and New York state laws by moving more than $2 billion illegally through the U.S. financial system—via more than 20,000 transactions—on behalf of Cuban and Iranian entities, violating U.S. economic sanctions.
The U.S. has several recently created whistleblower programs for revealing the evasion of U.S. economic sanctions. The Treasury Whistleblower Program allows whistleblowers to submit information about money laundering to the Treasury Department anonymously if it is done through an attorney. Whistleblowers can receive an award if the enforcement action’s monetary sanctions (penalties, disgorgement and interest) exceed $1 million based on the whistleblower’s information.
If you have information of evasion of U.S. sanctions and wish to be a whistleblower contact Attorney Jeff Newman at JeffNewmanLaw for a confidential free consultation. He can be reached at Jeff@JeffNewmanLawcom, 617-823-3217 or at www.JeffNewmanLaw.com .
