A federal jury in New York has issued a nearly $21 million verdict against France\u2019s largest bank for giving the Sudanese government access to the U.S. financial system as it engaged in atrocities two decades ago.<\/p>\n
The woman and two men who obtained the verdict against BNP Paribas<\/a> S.A. are U.S. citizens who left\u00a0Sudan<\/a>\u00a0after being displaced, losing their homes and property. They were awarded amounts of between $6.7 million and $7.3 million apiece on Friday after jurors deliberated for about four hours.<\/p>\n In an Aug. 28 pretrial memo, the plaintiffs argued BNP Paribas helped the Sudanese government \u201ccarry out one of the most notorious campaigns of persecution in modern history.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re very gratified that steps on the road toward justice are being achieved, and they\u2019re happy that the bank is being held responsible for its abhorrent conduct,\u201d their lawyer, Adam Levitt, said Saturday.<\/p>\n A spokesperson for BNP Paribas said in an email the result \u201cis clearly wrong and there are very strong grounds to appeal the verdict\u201d and that the bank had not been allowed to introduce important evidence.<\/p>\n The bank argued Sudan had other sources of money and that the company did not knowingly help the government engage in human rights abuses under former President\u00a0Omar al-Bashir<\/a>.<\/p>\n BNP Paribas gave Sudanese authorities access to international money markets from at least 2002 to 2008. As many as 300,000 people were killed and 2.7 million driven from their homes in the Darfur region over the years. The litigation pertains to government actions in many parts of the country.<\/p>\n Al-Bashir is being held<\/a>\u00a0in a military-run detention facility in northern Sudan, his lawyer said earlier this month. He has been charged by the International Criminal Court with crimes that include genocide but has not been handed over to face justice in The Hague. Sudan plunged into a\u00a0civil war<\/a>\u00a0more than two years ago, sparking what aid organizations have described as one of the world\u2019s worst displacement and hunger crises.<\/p>\n Lawyers for the French bank argued it did not have liability, saying in an August court filing that, \u201cHuman rights abuses in Sudan did not start with BNPP, did not end when BNPP left Sudan, and were not caused by BNPP.\u201d<\/p>\n BNP Paribas, they wrote, \u201dnever participated in Sudanese military transactions in any way \u2014 it never financed Sudan\u2019s purchase of arms, and there is no evidence linking any specific transaction to Plaintiffs\u2019 injuries.\u201d<\/p>\n Levitt, the plaintiffs\u2019 attorney, called the case a \u201cbellwether trial\u201d with findings he hopes to apply to other Sudanese refugees, 23,000 U.S. citizens, who are members of the class-action case.<\/p>\n The BNP spokesperson said the verdict was specific to the three plaintiffs and \u201cshould not have broader application beyond this decision.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2014, BNP Paribas agree to pay nearly $9 billion to\u00a0settle a case<\/a>\u00a0by entering a guilty plea in New York and acknowledging it processed\u00a0billions of dollars<\/a>\u00a0in transactions for clients in Sudan as well as Cuba and Iran.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A federal jury in New York has issued a nearly $21 million verdict against France\u2019s largest bank for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":510618,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5309],"tags":[331,118566,30,2000,299,36],"class_list":{"0":"post-510617","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-france","8":"tag-banks","9":"tag-bnp-paribas","10":"tag-courts","11":"tag-eu","12":"tag-europe","13":"tag-france"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115397890526717218","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/510617","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=510617"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/510617\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/510618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=510617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=510617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=510617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}