Lawmakers should press ahead with Iran sanctions bills despite pressure to put off new restrictions while American and Iranian officials hold nuclear talks, according to David Ibsen, executive director of United Against Nuclear Iran.
Despite tightened controls on interbank messaging, some bankers looking to hide the role of their blacklisted clients in international wires need only type a single key on their keyboard, according to experts.
The government of Iran and banks under its influence are increasingly using investments in foreign financial institutions as a means to circumvent sanctions, including restrictions on interbank messages, say sources.
After a busy year for federal sanctions officials, large banks with international footprints are increasingly instituting deeper, standalone audits of their related policies and procedures, say compliance officers and consultants.
The U.S. House of Representatives Wednesday approved legislation that would require the White House to identify interbank messengers serving Iran's financial sector and order companies to divulge their Iranian ties.
An Iranian bank's legal challenge to British and EU sanctions is an issue of "public importance" meriting the consideration of additional justices, the U.K. Supreme Court ruled Thursday.
India faces a possible U.S. sanction over its reluctance to reduce Iranian oil purchases, MONEYVAL believes knowledge about the money laundering risks of new payment methods and the Internet is "relatively low", and more, in this week's roundup.
Proposals to bar Iranian financial institutions from a global interbank messaging service would impose additional costs on Iran's banks without entirely blocking them from accessing Western financial institutions.
The rejection by the EU Parliament Thursday of a data sharing agreement with the United States is likely to leave U.S. investigators without timely access to European banking data for the second month in a row.
EU party leaders have rejected delaying a Thursday vote on an interim agreement to share European financial data with U.S. counterterrorism investigators.
The Belgian-based consortium plans to open the center by then end of 2009 as part of an effort to restructure how financial data is transmitted internationally.
The agreement, announced June 27, resulted from months of negotiations after an EU advisory panel found that the consortium's sharing of information with the United States violated EU data protection laws.
An EU advisory panel determined that an international banking consortium violated data protection laws there when it complied with a U.S. administrative subpoena giving the Bush administration access to millions of private financial transaction records.