SCHEME SUBVERTED CURBS ON IRAN

New York, Dec. 1: A Turkish- Iranian gold trader testifying at trial in New York on Thursday implicated Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in a multi- billiondollar gold- for- oil scheme allegedly designed to subvert US sanctions on Iran.

Reza Zarrab, 34, who was arrested in Miami in 2016 before agreeing to cooperate with US prosecutors, implied that Erdogan knew how he and a Turkish banker, now on trial, circumvented US sanctions on Iran and laundered money from Iranian petroleum sales.

The case has angered Mr Erdogan. His government has called the trial a “plot” and he has demanded the release of Mr Zarrab and defendant, Mehmet Hakan Atilla, the deputy chief executive of Turkish lender Halkbank.

“We did the right thing. We did not violate the embargo,” Erdogan told lawmakers in Turkey on Thursday, according to state

Haber.

But in New York, Mr Zarrab said he was told that in 2012, Mr Erdogan, prime minister at the time, and then treasury minister Ali Babacan had given “instructions” for two other Turkish public banks, Vakif and Ziraat, to take part in the scheme.

Turkey’s then economy minister, Zaref Caglayan, “told me that Mr. Prime Minister had given approval for Ziraat and Vakif to also do this work,” he said.

Mr Zarrab also used his second day of testimony to declare that he extended the multi- billion- dollar scheme to India and tried to do so in China.

“But then all the banks we were working with, they immediately stopped it when they realised it had something to do with Iran,” Zarrab testified on Wednesday, he said he paid tens of millions of dollars worth of bribes to Caglayan between 2012 and 2013.