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18-1589
United States v. Atilla
United States Court of Appeals For the Second Circuit
August Term 2019
Argued: December 16, 2019
Decided: July 20, 2020
No. 18-1589
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,
Appellee, v.
MEHMET HAKAN ATILLA,
Defendant-Appellant.
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York
No. 15-cr-867, Richard M. Berman, Judge.
...
Mehmet Hakan Atilla, a Turkish national and former Deputy General Manager of Turkey’s state-owned bank, Türkiye Halk Bankaşi, A.S. (“Halkbank”), appeals his conviction on charges relating to an alleged multibillion-dollar scheme to evade U.S. economic sanctions against Iran. On appeal, Atilla challenges his convictions on four grounds, maintaining that the district court erred in...
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1) The excerpted portion of the option is of high practical significance insofar as it undercuts the theory, advanced on several occasions by the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, that a non-U.S. person may be criminally or civilly charged, under IEEPA, with “evasion” or “avoidance” of secondary sanctions provisions where none of the conduct at issue is alleged to constitute the “evasion” or “avoidance” of any then-existing “prohibition.” While the 2nd Circuit dealt only with secondary sanctions provisions in this case, the reasoning would presumably extend to any allegation that a non-U.S. person has acted so as to “evade” or “avoid” the imposition of sanctions under one or more “derivative designation” criterion, at least assuming that the conduct at issue does not separately violate an actual sanctions prohibition. The court indirectly finds significance in...