The penalty reflects the increasingly active approach in the UK to the enforcement of sanctions breaches.

The UK’s financial sanctions regulator, HM Treasury’s Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation (OFSI), has issued a record penalty totaling £20.5 million (roughly US$25 million) against Standard Chartered Bank (SCB) for breaching the EU prohibition on providing long-term credit to listed Russian financial institutions and their non-EU subsidiaries by extending loans to the Turkish entity DenizBank A.S. (DenizBank), which at the relevant time was majority-owned by Sberbank.