U.S. District Judge Richard Berman sentenced Mehmet Hakan Atilla, a Turkish banker at Turkey's state-controlled Halkbank, to 32 months in prison on Wednesday after he was found guilty of taking part in a scheme to help Iran evade U.S. sanctions.
The 47-year-old Turkish citizen Atilla had been convicted at a trial that ended in January.
Prosecutors had sought a sentence of about 20 years for Atilla who worked as a deputy general manager at Halkbank.
They have said that beginning around 2012, Atilla was involved in a scheme to help Iran spend oil and gas revenues abroad using fraudulent gold and food transactions through Halkbank, violating U.S. sanctions.
According to prosecutors, the central figure in the scheme was Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's 'Goldfinger' Turkish-Iranian trader Reza Zarrab, who pleaded guilty to fraud, conspiracy and money laundering charges, and testified for several days as the U.S. government's star witness against Atilla.
Zarrab, who has yet to be sentenced, said on the witness stand during Atilla's trial that he bribed Turkish officials, and that Erdoğan personally signed off on parts of the scheme while serving as Turkey's prime minister.
The case threatened to reopen a case that reached right into Erdoğan’s inner circle and to tarnish the ruling AKP party that he founded.
Erdoğan has repeatedly condemned Atilla's conviction, most recently in an interview with Bloomberg Television on Tuesday.
"If Atilla is going to be declared a criminal, that would be almost equivalent to declaring the Republic of Turkey a criminal," Erdoğan said.
