MANHATTAN (CN) – Calling the Turkish banker a “cog in the machine” of sanctions evasion, a U.S. federal judge sentenced Halkbank manager Hakan Atilla on Wednesday to prison term of less than three years for helping launder billions to Iran.
“So, let me start by welcoming you all here and mentioning at the outset that this is something of an exceptional sentencing proceeding in the sense, among others, that in addition to U.S. citizens who generally follow our cases, there no doubt are large number of Turkish citizens who are also very interested in and are following these proceedings,” U.S. District Judge Richard Berman said as the three-hour hearing kicked off this morning.
Watched intensely from New York to Istanbul, the proceedings ended with a likewise extraordinary 32-month sentence, a prison term lower than what prosecutors or even defense attorneys requested.
That means Atilla will spend roughly a year and a half more in prison, after deducting time the 47-year-old already served at New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center since his arrest last year.
A former manager at Turkey’s state-run Halkbank, Atilla was convicted by a federal jury in January for helping funnel billions to Iran in violation of U.S. sanctions.
During trial last year, prosecutors labeled Atilla an “architect” of two schemes to accomplish this.
Rejecting that notion today, Berman said that Atilla’s Halkbank boss Suleyman Aslan and gold trader Reza Zarrab far eclipsed his role.
“Mr. Atilla appears less culpable, certainly than Zarrab, and Mr. Atilla appears to have been following orders in large measure from his boss, Mr. Aslan, who was the general manager of Halkbank at the relevant times,” the judge said.
Zarrab, a former ally of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, pleaded guilty shortly before trial and delivered days of testimony that infuriated Ankara and turned him into a persona non grata in Turkey.
The gold trader still awaits sentencing on a date to be determined.
Berman’s comments appeared to stun Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Lockard, who had sought a more than 15-year sentence.
“This is the biggest sanctions-evasion case prosecuted in the United States that we're aware of,” Lockard said, sounding dispirited by the judge’s opening remarks.
“The scope and scale is massive," he added.
Prosecutors believed that these sanctions violations helped Iran at the heart of negotiations over the nuclear deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
“This is not a case about drugs, it's not a case about shipments of weapons,” Lockard said. “But it is, in a very real sense, a case about nuclear capability. Nuclear capability by the world's foremost state sponsor of terrorism.”
But the prosecutor’s strong words did not match a voice and demeanor that were otherwise listless, and with good reason.
By then, Judge Berman already had rejected the prosecution’s depiction of Atilla’s role and revealed that his sentence would be “appropriately lenient." The judge praised the “exemplary life” that he said Atilla lived prior to his criminal offenses, and he held up a stack of 101 letters from Atilla’s family, friends and colleagues attesting to the banker’s character.
"Atilla appears to have been a person doing his job, sometimes reluctantly or hesitatingly, under the direction of the Halkbank general manager Mr. Aslan, who did take bribes," Berman said.