BNP to pay $9 billion fine, faces dollar-clearing ban

NEW YORK/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - French bank BNP Paribas on Monday agreed to pay almost $9 billion over charges it violated U.S. sanctions against countries such as Sudan, and faces a one-year suspension of parts of its U.S. dollar-clearing business. The bank's general counsel, Georges Dirani, briefly appeared in New York state court to plead guilty to one count of falsifying business records and one count of conspiracy. U.S. authorities found that BNP Paribas had evaded sanctions against a range of black-listed countries, in part by stripping information from wire transfers so they could pass through the U.S. system without raising red flags. "Through a series of egregious schemes to evade detection and with the knowledge of multiple senior executives, BNP employees concealed more than $190 billion in transactions between 2002 and 2012," the New York State regulator, headed by Benjamin Lawsky, said in a press release.

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