By Elena Vardon
Shares in BNP Paribas fell to a six-month low on Monday after the French bank lost a case linked to its alleged role in giving the Sudanese government access to international money markets during the Darfur genocide roughly two decades ago.
A New York federal jury on Friday found the French lender liable to pay $20.75 million in civil damages to three Sudanese plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit brought on behalf of refugees who fled violence and persecution and testified about human rights abuses under former President Omar al-Bashir.
They alleged that BNP Paribas facilitated transactions for the Sudanese government between 2002 and 2008, enabling the regime's campaign of ethnic cleansing, displacement and mass killing, according to their lawyers.
BNP Paribas said Monday that it intends to fight the case.
"We strongly believe this verdict should be overturned on appeal. Once again, BNP Paribas reaffirms that this result is clearly wrong and ignores important evidence the bank was not permitted to introduce," it said in a statement.
Shares on Monday fell more than 10% to their lowest level since April.
In 2014, BNP Paribas settled with U.S. authorities, agreeing to pay nearly $9 billion and pled guilty to violating sanctions against Sudan, Iran and Cuba. At the time, BNP Paribas acknowledged using banks overseas to process more than $20 billion in transactions linked to companies and government agencies in Sudan, when the country was engaged in what the U.S. and other countries labeled a genocide.
While that process focused on potential sanctions violations, the trial that wound up Friday centered on whether BNP Paribas's provision of financial services was a "natural and adequate cause" of the injuries that survivors suffered from ethnic cleansing and mass violence.
AlphaValue analyst Sylvain Perret said the compensation the bank could be forced to pay for the rest of the plaintiffs could amount to a potentially larger sum. The current verdict "increases considerably the litigation risk for BNP in the context of this case," he added.
BNP Paribas said the verdict is specific to the three plaintiffs and shouldn't have a broader application, adding that any attempt to extrapolate is "necessarily wrong."
"A combination of a lack of visibility on the potential financial impact and next legal steps, a reminder of 2014 share-price performance as well as a capital path that leaves relatively little room for error, is likely to hang over the shares," RBC Capital Markets analyst Anke Reingen wrote in a note to clients.
The bank's stock was also pressured lower by rating agency S&P Global's downgrade of France's credit score, after a similar move by Fitch Ratings last month. Peers Credit Agricole and Societe Generale both fell as much as 3% before paring some of the losses in midday exchanges in Paris.
Write to Elena Vardon at elena.vardon@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
October 20, 2025 08:24 ET (12:24 GMT)
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