InfoBytes Blog
District Court dismisses suit claiming banks evading Iran sanctions
On September 16, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York dismissed an action alleging 10 financial institutions (defendants) conspired to evade U.S. sanctions on financial and business dealings with Iran, resulting in the direct and indirect material support for terrorism. According to the opinion, the plaintiffs—a group of veterans who served in Iraq from 2004 to 2011 and were injured or killed by terrorist attacks during that time—alleged that the defendants conspired with the Government of Iran, and multiple state-affiliated and private Iranian entities that work with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s (IRGC) and Hezbollah’s terrorist activities, to evade U.S. sanctions and conduct illicit trade-finance transactions, which helped to facilitate Iran’s provision of material support to terrorist activities. The defendants moved to dismiss the action and, in July 2018, a magistrate judge issued a Report and Recommendation (R&R) recommending that the motions be denied in their entirety.
On review, the district court declined to adopt the R&R and granted the defendants’ motion to dismiss. The court noted that the plaintiffs’ allegations indicate that Iran conspired to provide material support to the terrorist organizations, but failed to establish that the defendants “agreed to provide illegal financial services to Iranian financial and commercial entities . . . with the intent that those services would ultimately benefit a terrorist organization.” Moreover, the court reasoned that “it is up to Congress, and not the judiciary, to authorize terrorism victims to recover damages for their injuries from financial institutions that conspire with state sponsors of terrorism like Iran to evade U.S. sanctions under circumstances such as those presented in this case.”