Suit Accuses Banks of Role in Financing Terror Attacks
The suit accuses banks — including HSBC and Barclays — of helping to finance the violent activities through their ties to Iran, painting Wall Street as a sort of middleman of terror.
Those acts of terrorism occurred a world away from Wall Street at the height of the Iraq war. But they now underpin a lawsuit against some of the world’s biggest banks, injecting a human element into the complex and shadowy world of international finance.
More than 200 people, primarily American service members or family members of soldiers killed in Iraq, filed the lawsuit on Monday in federal court in Brooklyn. Citing more than 50 attacks on American citizens stationed or working in Iraq during the war, the lawsuit accuses the banks of helping to finance the violent activities through their ties to Iran.
The banks — HSBC, Barclays, Standard Chartered, the Royal Bank of Scotland and Credit Suisse, European institutions that all have a major presence in New York — did not deal directly with the militants. But they have acknowledged transferring billions of dollars on behalf of Iran, which has long been suspected of funding and training the terrorist groups that carried out attacks against Americans in Iraq.
The lawsuit is not the first to link Wall Street to Iran. In suing the five banks, the plaintiffs are taking their cue from federal prosecutors, who accused those same banks of transferring money on behalf of Iran in violation of United States sanctions. The banks settled the cases over the last few years, paying hundreds of millions of dollars in fines and admitting to wrongdoing. Those admissions are now serving as a template for the private lawsuit.
But the lawsuit filed on Monday reaches far beyond the government’s claims, painting Wall Street as a sort of middleman of terror. The lawsuit blames the banks for terrorist attacks that they did not actually finance, a strategy that hinges on an elaborate and indirect link: The banks happened to do business with Iranian financial institutions that have separately financed Hezbollah, the Shiite militant group and political party suspected of aiding attacks in Iraq, as well as Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force “and other instruments of Iranian state-sponsored terrorism.”
“The defendants provided Iran with the means by which it could transfer more than $150 million to the I.R.G.C.-Q.F., Hezbollah and Special Groups, which were actively engaged in planning and perpetrating the murder and maiming of hundreds of Americans in Iraq,” the lawsuit said.
The case, which aims to show the human cost of something as impersonal as a wire transfer, represents the latest phase of a strategy among plaintiffs’ lawyers to pin blame on banks for acts of terrorism.
Gary M. Osen, one of the lawyers who filed the lawsuit said: “Does it matter whether a particular bank was the physical conduit of the transfers to the terror apparatus, or is it enough that they were in a conspiracy which made that possible, and that they were, as a legal matter, deliberately indifferent to that result?”
Source: NYT-Suit Accuses Banks of Role in Financing Terror Attacks
