If Turkish president Erdogan needed one more reason to go ballistic in his daily comparisons of western leaders to Hilter and the Nazis, he got it this morning when a top executive at Halkbank, one of Turkey’s largest state-owned banks was arrested at JFK airport on charges of conspiring with an Iranian-Turkish financier who is awaiting trial for using his network of companies to circumvent Iranian sanctions.
As first reported by Bloomberg, Mehmet Hakan Atilla, deputy CEO at Turkiye Halk Bankasi, was taken into U. S. custody at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York on Tuesday. He was detained on suspicion of conspiring to execute transactions on behalf of Iran. The arrest was made in connection with the pending prosecution of Reza Zarrab. The U. S. claims it has evidence that Zarrab paid millions of dollars in bribes to Turkish government officials and top executives at Halkbank, as it is commonly known, which allegedly helped Zarrab process the transactions.
This post was published at Zero Hedge on Mar 28, 2017.
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