According to the banking regulator of New York state, Liverpool shirt sponsors Standard Chartered hid approximately 60,000 transactions worth over $250 billion that it made on behalf of sanctioned Iranian banks and corporations over the past decade. The bank also sought to keep secret similar but less lucrative schemes with Libya, Sudan, and Burma.
Despite being a British bank, in all cases under investigation they routed the transactions through their New York operations, leaving "the U.S. financial system vulnerable to terrorists, weapons dealers, drug kingpins, and corrupt regimes" according to the regulatory agency. Moreover, there were systematic attempts by the bank to scrub their records of any such dealings, and Standard Chartered is further charged with having created "a formalized operating manual that showed staff members how to strip off any information from the transactions."
Standard Chartered is said to be reviewing their United States sanctions compliance in the wake of these accusations. There is no news as to whether Liverpool will seek a formal statement of apology from the bank for any damage to their brand that might come from being associated with an institution accused of breaking the laws of the country it was operating in to deal with sanctioned regimes and institutions in Iran and elsewhere.
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