Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc. agreed to pay $250 million to the state of New York to settle claims it transferred billions of dollars for countries facing U.S. sanctions, including Iran, Sudan and Myanmar, financial regulators said Thursday.
Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ Ltd., the main lending unit of Japan's biggest bank by market value, moved an estimated $100 billion through the state for government and privately owned entities on the Specially Designated Nationals list issued by the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) between 2002 and 2007, the New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS) and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said in a statement Thursday.
The transfers involved about 28,000 clearing transactions and the bank routinely stripped information from wire transfer messages that could identify countries and people subject to international sanctions, the department said. The agreement follows HSBC Holdings PLC's record settlement with the U.S. last year, stemming from sanctions aimed at pressuring Iran to halt its nuclear program.