• Submitted by: manso
• United States
• Politics and Government
• 08 / 17 / 2010

---

Some people are under the impression, or giving out the impression, that Washington is ending the half-century-long blockade of Cuba. This doesn't tell us exactly what Barclay's admitted that it did as far as Cuba is concerned. Some of that will probably come out in time.

U.S. charges Britain's Barclays Bank with violating sanctions against Cuba, Iran

Federal prosecutors filed criminal charges against Barclays Bank on Monday,alleging that it violated U.S. financial sanctions against Cuba, Iran, Libya,Sudan and Burma for more than a decade and accusing the British bank of knowingly aiding banks in those countries with potentially $500 million in transactions from March 1995 to September 2006.

In papers filed in federal court in the District, the U.S. government alleged that Barclays, through its U.S. dollar clearing operation at its New York branch, followed directions to omit the names of banks in sanctioned countries when sending payments to the United States, stripped off identifying information, routed payments through an internal account to hide links to those countries and deliberately used less transparent "cover payments."

A spokeswoman for the Department of Justice did not immediately comment about the criminal information, which charged the bank with one count of violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and one count of trading with the enemy and which was signed by Jennifer Shasky Calvery, chief of the U.S. Justice Department's asset forfeiture and money-laundering section.

A London spokeswoman for Barclays said a statement was forthcoming and referred questions to the bank in New York. A spokesman for Barclays in New York declined to comment.

A 1 p.m. hearing was planned before U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan.

The U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control oversees bans on U.S. entities from dealing with Cuba that date to the Kennedy administration,with Libya to 1986, Iran to 1995, and Burma and Sudan to 1997.

In September 2008, Barclays purchased the U.S. and New York operations of bankrupt Lehman Brothers for about $1.3 billion, a massive deal that remains before a federal bankruptcy court in New York.

In court papers pending Sullivan's approval, Barclays agreed to forfeit $298 million to the United States and to New York, and the U.S. government agreed to defer criminal prosecution for 24 months "in light of Barclays' remedial actions to date, its willingness to cooperate with the United States, and its agreement to settle any and all civil and criminal claims held by the United States."

Barclays, one of the largest banks in the world with $2 trillion in assets as of Dec. 31, voluntarily disclosed to OFAC four transactions that violated sanctions in May 2006, and cut off dealing with sanctioned banks that November before launching an internal review with U.S. investigators of transactions starting in 2000 and ending July 31, 2007.

Prosecutors said Barclays officials outside the United States caused its New York branch to process payments that otherwise should have been rejected,blocked or held for investigation under OFAC rules, and prevented the branch from filing required Bank Secrecy Act and OFAC reports.

U.S. officials cited transactions managed through the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or SWIFT, system.

The bank's New York officials began warning of potential misuse of payment message information as early as October 2001, telling British headquarters of an example of "how foreign banks circumvent the OFAC regulations" after a Sudanese payment was stopped.

However, Barclays "continued disguising sanctioned payments and routing them through its New York Branch until early- to mid-2006," prosecutors charged, when senior management learned of the four suspect transactions.

By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 16, 2010; 1:31 PM

Source: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/message/116993