NEW YORK (AP) — A judge cited a Rudy Giuliani-led effort to get top U.S. and Turkey political figures to intervene in a New York criminal case Thursday as he rejected efforts by a state-owned bank in Turkey to feign ignorance of criminal charges it faces.
U.S. District Judge Richard M. Berman in Manhattan said Halkbank, in effect, would be a fugitive if it refused to send lawyers to represent it against the charges.
At a hearing last month, Berman said legal maneuvers by the bank were “kind of crazy” as its lawyers asked to challenge the right of an American court, and Berman in particular, to handle the case without entering a plea to the charges.
Halkbank was charged with evading sanctions against Iran by processing billions of dollars of Iranian oil revenue. An indictment said the bank illegally moved about $20 billion in Iranian oil and gas revenues, sometimes disguising money movements as purchases of food and medicine so they’d qualify for a “humanitarian exception” to sanctions.
Although the bank was not charged until recently, the allegations involving it surfaced in 2015 when a wealthy Turkish-Iranian gold trader was arrested on sanctions charges as he prepared to take his family to Disney World in Florida.
The trader — Reza Zarrab — hired Giuliani, the former New York City mayor, to try to broker a deal between Turkey’s president and the U.S. government to resolve the charges. The talks in 2017 failed to result in a deal.
In Thursday’s written ruling, Berman said the talks resulted from “an extraordinary, sustained series of Turkey-initiated state to state meetings, contacts, and involvements began — outside the courtroom — between and among Turkish and U.S. officials, lobbyists and attorneys.”
Berman wrote that the objective of the campaign was initially to obtain the release of Zarrab, despite the criminal charges.