Breaking News: U.S. Arrests Iran Businessman for Scheme to Evade Iran Sanctions

A Iran businessman Reza Zarrab has been arrested in Florida on U.S. charges that he and others engaged in hundreds of millions of dollars of transactions for the Iranian government or other entities as part of a scheme to evade sanctions against the country.

Reza Zarrab, 33, was charged in an indictment filed in Manhattan federal court along with one of his employees, Kamelia Jamshidy, and a senior officer at a unit of Bank Mellat in Iran, Hossein Najafzadeh, U.S. prosecutors said on Monday.

Zarrab was arrested on Saturday in Miami and appeared in federal court there on Monday, where a federal magistrate judge ordered him detained. Both Jamshidy and Najafzadeh, who are both Iranian nationals, remained at large.

A lawyer for Zarrab did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Jamshidy and Najafzadeh could not be immediately contacted.

The arrest came two months after Iran emerged from years of economic isolation when world powers led by the United States and the European Union lifted crippling sanctions against the country in return for curbs on Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.

According to the indictment, Zarrab, a dual citizen of Turkey and Iran, owned and operated a network of companies in Turkey and in the United Arab Emirates, including Royal Holding A.S., which employed Jamshidy.

The indictment said Zarrab, Jamshidy and Najafzadeh, a senior officer at Bank Mellat’s Mellat Exchange, conspired to thwart economic sanctions against Iran by concealing transactions benefiting Iran’s government and Iranian entities.

Prosecutors said that from 2010 to 2015, the trio helped Iranian individuals and entities, including Bank Mellat, one of the largest banks in Iran, evade U.S. sanctions by conducting financial transactions through Turkish and Emirati companies.

The indictment charges Zarrab, Jamshidy, 29, and Najafzadeh, 65, with engaging in conspiracies to defraud the United States, to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, to commit bank fraud and to commit money laundering.

The case is U.S. v. Zarrab, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 15-cr-867.