FDD EVENT | Atilla, Zarrab, and U.S.-Turkish Relations

January 18, 2018

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The Foundation for Defense of Democracies and its Center on Sanctions and Illicit Finance hosted a conversation on "Atilla, Zarrab, and U.S.-Turkish Relations: Implications of the Biggest Sanctions-Evasion Scheme in Recent History," on Thursday, January 18, 2018. The conversation featured Mark Dubowitz, FDD’s Chief Executive Officer; Dr. Aykan Erdemir, Senior Fellow at FDD and former member of the Turkish Parliament; Dr. Jonathan Schanzer, FDD’s Senior Vice President for Research; and Merve Tahiroglu, a research analyst at FDD focusing on Turkey. Amb. Eric S. Edelman, former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey, and Senior Advisor at FDD, moderated the conversation.

The landmark trial involving Turkish banker Mehmet Hakan Atilla and gold trader Reza Zarrab concluded this month. FDD’s Turkey and Iran teams were intimately familiar with the background, having conducting extensive research for years on sanctions-busting and sanctions-evasion. It is now clear that the 2012 “Gas-for-Gold” scheme, the “Gold Loophole” in American sanctions law, and a scheme involving falsified humanitarian trade yielded Iran as much as $100 billion at a time when the U.S. policy was ostensibly to pressure Iran to verifiably halt its nuclear weapons program. That there was complicity at the highest levels of the government of Turkey, a NATO ally, is now beyond question.

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