WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A U.S. jury on Friday returned a historic verdict against BNP Paribas, finding the French bank helped Sudan's government commit genocide by providing banking services that violated American sanctions.
The federal jury in Manhattan ordered BNP Paribas to pay a combined $20.5 million to three Sudanese plaintiffs who testified about human rights abuses perpetrated under former President Omar al-Bashir's rule.
Lawyers for the three plaintiffs, who now reside in the U.S., said the verdict opens the door for over 20,000 refugees in the U.S. to seek billions of dollars in damages from the French bank.
"Our clients lost everything to a campaign of destruction fueled by U.S. dollars, that BNP Paribas facilitated and that should have been stopped," said Bobby DiCello, a lawyer for the plaintiffs.
A BNP Paribas spokesman said the verdict should be overturned on appeal, adding that the bank believes it is specific to the three individual plaintiffs and should not have broader application.
"BNP Paribas believes that this result is clearly wrong and there are very strong grounds to appeal the verdict, which is based on a distortion of controlling Swiss law and ignores important evidence the bank was not permitted to introduce," the spokesman said.
The verdict followed a five-week jury trial conducted by U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein, who last year denied a request by BNP Paribas to get the case thrown out ahead of trial.
The trial focused on whether BNP Paribas's financial services were a “natural and adequate cause” of the harm suffered by survivors of ethnic cleansing and mass violence.
Hellerstein wrote in his decision last year that there were facts showing a relationship between BNP Paribas' banking services and abuses perpetrated by the Sudanese government.
The ruling came in a proposed class action lawsuit brought by U.S. residents who had fled non-Arab indigenous black African communities in South Sudan, Darfur, and the Nuba Mountains in central Sudan.
The U.S. government recognized the Sudanese conflict as a genocide in 2004.
BNP Paribas had in 2014 agreed to plead guilty and pay an $8.97 billion penalty to settle U.S. charges it transferred billions of dollars for Sudanese, Iranian and Cuban entities subject to economic sanctions.
(Reporting by Jan Wolfe; editing by Diane Craft)
