British Expats - HSBC appear to believe that I am funding the Iranian regime...

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HSBC appear to believe that I am funding the Iranian regime...

Approximately June 2015, I was in the process of hiring a maid. I contacted a Dubai-based travel agency who were able to arrange for me a fresh tourist visa and flights to Kish Island and back, to give me enough time to process the maids visa paperwork. This method of visa trip is quite a common one, I am led to believe.

I was given the bank details of the tourist agency, Emirates NBD as I recall, so I could transfer the funds to them. I set up 2 payments. One for the visa, and one for the flights. In the comments section of HSBC’s Domestic Money Transfer system, I noted the name of the passenger and route that the monies related to for the flight monies. The visa payment went straight thru, however, the flights one did not.

After a couple of days of waiting for the monies to arrive and numerous phone calls to HSBC enquiring on where the money had gone, as it had been debited immediately from my account, but had not arrived in the payee’s account, I eventually found out that HSBC were unwilling to process the payment, because Kish Island is part of Iran.

Bemused that HSBC couldn’t tell the difference between paying someone in UAE for a flight, and me funding the Iranians, I walked into a branch of bank the travel company used and paid it via their counter services.

Fast forward to January of this year. On January 28th, I received an email from HSBC asking the following questions.

• The above transaction was not passed through your HSBC account, how did you pay for the tickets?
• If it was a cash transaction, was the amount withdrawn from HSBC Bank Account?
• Do you have any other Bank account in UAE other than HSBC?

After advising HSBC of my amazement that this was still an issue, and them advising me they took these matters very seriously (although not serious enough to ask the questions until 7 months after the fact), I provided the answers to their questions, those answers being;
• Cash
• No
• No

I promptly received a clarification question, where I was advised upon receipt of the answers, this would conclude the matter. These clarification questions were;
• Was the cash in hand (wallet) at that time withdrawn from your HSBC account?
• If no, kindly advise the source of these funds

To which I replied;
• No.
• Business Expenses paid via petty cash by my employer.

Now, somewhere is the middle of this to-and-fro’ing, HSBC advised me that, being a responsible institution, they were within their rights to take whatever actions they considered appropriate to meet any obligations, either in the Country or elsewhere in the world, relating to the prevention of fraud, money laundering and terrorist activity and the provision of financial and other services to persons who may be subject to sanctions.

It would appear that they felt the appropriate action to take, 7 months after the attempted flight ticket payment, was to deny me access to all my banking options, bar using my ATM and credit cards. I cannot even make an online payment to HSBC to pay my credit cards..!!