A federal judge sentenced a Turkish banker to 32 months in prison for conspiring to evade U.S. sanctions and entering into prohibited transactions for the Government of Iran.
In a case tried in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Mehmet Hakan Atilla was found guilty by a jury for providing the Iranian government and other entities with access to the U.S. financial system through his role as an executive at Turkish state-owned Halkbank between 2010 and 2015. Mr. Atilla and his co-conspirators were found to have concealed evidence of illicit currency and gold transactions on behalf of Iranian entities by attempting to misrepresent them as humanitarian transactions involving food, which would have been exempt from the sanctions.
Mr. Atilla was convicted of (i) conspiring to defraud the United States, (ii) violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, (iii) bank fraud and (iv) money laundering.
The Court sentenced Atilla to a term of imprisonment significantly shorter than the life sentence recommended by the U.S. Probation Department or the 20 years sought by the prosecutors. He found that Mr. Atilla was unlikely to commit another crime, and that he had been a minor and somewhat reluctant participant in the conspiracy to evade sanctions.
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