ISLAMABAD, OCT 05 (DNA) – In a new twist to the case related to imposition of $225 million penalty on Habib Bank Limited (HBL) by the United States, a senior bank official said on Wednesday the US regulators misconstrued identities of two Pakistanis with prohibited persons of Iraq and Iran.

The two transactions that the US regulators said were conducted by Iraq’s former deputy prime minister under Saddam Hussein, Tariq Aziz, and an Iranian oil tanker company, Al-Ameen, were actually carried out by Pakistani individuals, said Nausheen Ahmad, head of the HBL legal department.

She was speaking before members of the Senate Standing Committee on Finance that had called the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) and the HBL officials to get a briefing on the US’s decision to impose $225 million civil monetary penalty on New York branch of the HBL.

The US had put names of Iraq deputy PM and the Iranian oil tanker company on ‘Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List’, known as ‘SDN List’ and declared their transactions as suspicious.

“Tariq Aziz is very common name in Pakistan and Al-Ameen is a Pakistani trader based in Gujranawala. In our view these transactions were not ‘prohibited transactions’,” Ahmad told the committee