UniCredit Bank AG Agrees to Plead Guilty for Illegally Processing Transactions in Violation of Iranian Sanctions

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Monday, April 15, 2019
UniCredit Bank AG Agrees to Plead Guilty for Illegally Processing Transactions in Violation of Iranian Sanctions
UniCredit Group Banks Agree to Pay Over $1.3 Billion for Violating Sanctions

UniCredit Bank AG (UCB AG), a financial institution headquartered in Munich, operating under the name HypoVereinsbank, and part of the UniCredit Group has agreed to enter a guilty plea to conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and to defraud the United States by processing hundreds of millions of dollars of transactions through the U.S. financial system on behalf of an entity designated as a weapons of mass destruction proliferator and other Iranian entities subject to U.S. economic sanctions. UniCredit Bank Austria (BA), another financial institution in the UniCredit Group, headquartered in Vienna, Austria, agreed to forfeit $20 million and entered into a non-prosecution agreement to resolve an investigation into its violations of IEEPA. UniCredit SpA, the parent of both UCB AG and BA, has agreed to ensure that UCB AG and BA’s obligations are fulfilled.

Assistant Attorney General Brian A. Benczkowski of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, U.S. Attorney Jessie K. Liu of the District of Columbia, Assistant Director in Charge William F. Sweeny of the FBI’s New York Field Office and Special Agent in Charge Kelly Jackson of the IRS-Criminal Investigations (CI) Washington Field Division made the announcement.

According to court documents, over the course of almost 10 years, UCB AG knowingly and willfully moved at least $393 million through the U.S. financial system on behalf of sanctioned entities, most of which was for an entity the U.S. Government specifically prohibited from accessing the U.S. financial system. UCB AG engaged in this criminal conduct through a scheme, formalized in its own bank polices and designed to conceal from U.S. regulators and banks the involvement of sanctioned entities in certain transactions. UCB AG routed illegal payments through U.S. financial institutions for the benefit of the sanctioned entities in ways that concealed the involvement of the sanctioned entities, including through the use of companies that UCB AG knew would appear unconnected to the sanctioned entity despite being
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