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Category Archives: IAEA International Atomic Energy Agency
In 2015: WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States has imposed sanctions on Russian and Chinese companies, including Russian state-owned arms exporter Rosoboronexport, for violating a U.S. law restricting weapons trade with Iran, North Korea and Syria.
The U.S. State Department published a notice of the sanctions in the Federal Register on Wednesday. They were later condemned by the Russian Foreign Ministry.
Moscow will take countermeasures in response to new U.S. sanctions, Interfax reported late on Wednesday, citing a commentary on the Russian Foreign Ministry’s website.
The State Department’s notice did not specify how each company had run afoul of the United States’ Iran, North Korea, and Syria Nonproliferation Act, but the act prohibits the trade with those three countries of goods, services, or technology used to make weapons of mass destruction or cruise or ballistic missiles.
Russia has supported Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in a 4 1/2-year-old civil war that has killed more than 200,000 people and displaced millions, including by supplying him with military gear.
Iran and North Korea are under United Nations arms embargoes.
The sanctions announced on Wednesday prohibit the U.S. government from procuring goods or services from the listed entities, as well as selling them defense-related goods and services. Additionally, no new licenses will be granted to export certain controlled goods to the listed entities, and any existing such licenses will be suspended.
Many of the entities targeted on Wednesday already faced multiple rounds of U.S. sanctions.
One of the individuals listed was Chinese businessman Li Fangwei, also known as Karl Lee. He has already been sanctioned for allegedly supplying Iran’s ballistic missile program in violation of an embargo. He denied the allegations in a 2013 interview with Reuters.
The companies sanctioned also included China’s BST Technology and Trade Co, which had previously been sanctioned by the United States in 2013, the Russian Aircraft Corp, and two North Korean firms. The Sudanese Armed Forces were also listed in the notice, as well as the overseas arm of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, called the Qods Force, and its commander, Qassem Soleimani.
**** It gets worse and U.S. voters need to take notice as to why any relationship with Moscow is sitting on the knife’s edge.
(Paris)– France should reconsider allowing Rosoboronexport, Russia’s state-owned arms trading company, to participate in Euronaval, a major international arms show being held outside of Paris from October 17 to 21, 2016, human rights groups EuroMed Rights and Human Rights Watch said today. The arms show is sponsored by the French Defense Ministry.
The office building of Rosoboronexport company in Moscow, Russia, March 1, 2016.
“France is leading the call on ending violations in Syria but at the same time allowing Russia, which is complicit in those violations, to promote its weapons and land new deals,” said Michel Tubiana, president of EuroMed Rights. “It’s not acceptable to do business as usual with a company arming a government engaged in systematic atrocities against its own people.”
More than 90 exhibitors from 70 countries are expected to attend the Euronaval arms show, including Rosoboronexport. Rosoboronexport said in October, 2015, that it is continuing to supply arms to the Syrian government despite its record of serious international human rights and humanitarian law violations.
Under international law, providing weapons to Syria while its forces are known to be committing war crimes and crimes against humanity may translate into aiding and abetting the commission of those crimes. Any arms supplier could bear potential criminal liability as an accessory to those crimes and could face prosecution. In addition to Rosoboronexport, all other suppliers of arms to Syria should be subject to scrutiny.
The Russian government began conducting military operations in Syria on September 30, 2015. Since then, Russian-Syrian airstrikes have hit civilian objects and caused civilian casualties, Syrian-Russian joint military operations have extensively used internationally banned cluster munitions, and there has been an increase in the use of incendiary weapons in Syria. Since September 19, 2016, Russian-Syrian forces have bombarded opposition-controlled parts of the city of Aleppo. The attacks included the use of indiscriminate barrel bombs, cluster munitions, and incendiary weapons, and damaged or partially destroyed at least five hospitals in six separate attacks.
In November 2015, the Rosoboronexport chief executive officer, Anatoly Isaikin, indicated that Russia’s military involvement in Syria was “good testimony for Russian armaments.” Media reports indicate that Russian airstrikes in Syria actually have contributed to buyer interest in weaponry from Rosoboronexport and could result in billions of dollars in new contracts.
Given its role in Syria, Rosoboronexport should not be allowed to promote itself and seek new contracts at Euronaval, the organizations said. Should Rosoboronexport be permitted to participate in the arms show, all arms show participants, including official delegations and private arms brokers, should decline to negotiate any new deals with Rosoboronexport.
“Russia has offered Iran its latest Antey-2500 missiles, the head of Russian state defense conglomerate Rostec said on Monday according to media reports, after a deal to supply less powerful S-300 missiles was dropped under Western pressure. Sergei Chemezov said Tehran was now considering the offer, TASS news agency reported. Russia scrapped a contract to supply Iran with S-300 surface-to-air missiles under Western pressure in 2010, and Iran later filed a $4-billion international arbitration suit against Russia in Geneva, but the two countries remain allies.” (Reuters, “Russian offers Iran latest anti-aircraft missiles: TASS,”
2/23/15)
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“Russia’s government-run weapons manufacturer is supplying equipment for Iran’s missile program, intelligence documents recently presented to the US Congress indicate. According to intelligence estimates, this does not represent official cooperation between Moscow and Tehran, but rather demonstrates the inability of the Russian government to prevent state firms from engaging in illegal trade with the Islamic Republic. The Russian firm in question is Rosoboronexport, which supplied Iran with defensive missile systems in 2006 and continues to maintain business ties with Iran in the missile sector.” (YnetNews, “Russian manufacturer selling missile equipment to Iran,” 6/11/12)
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“For two years, the United States regarded Rosoboronexport, Russia’s official weapons exporter, as an international pariah for selling arms to Iran and Syria. Then, in 2010, the U.S. suddenly lifted sanctions against it. By June of this year, the reversal was complete: the Pentagon awarded the company a no-bid contract worth upwards of $1 billion… Rosoboronexport, whose annual revenues have grown to nearly $9 billion, had only recently been removed from the list of companies sanctioned by the U.S. State Department for violating U.S. laws prohibiting the sale of weapons to Iran and Syria. Among the suspected sales were surface-to-air missiles to Iran. But after sanctions were lifted, the Army went full steam ahead with plans to sole-source a $375 million contract to the Russian arms agency, now arguing that it was the only legitimate vendor of Russian armaments.” (Wired, “Russian Firm Got No-Bid Pentagon Contract After Selling Arms to Iran,” 8/31/11)
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“Russia’s state arms export agency said Monday that it is supplying Iran with defensive weapons, including surface-to-air missiles, but did not say whether they include the sophisticated long-range S-300 missiles…Rosoboronexport said in a statement that ‘only weapons of a defensive nature are being supplied to Iran, including anti-aircraft weaponry.’ It added that, previously, Tor-M1 air-defense systems were supplied to Iran.” (AssociatedPress, “Russia giving Iran only defensive weapons,” 12/22/08)
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“Rosoboronexport contracted with Iran late July to modernize 30 Su-24 front bombers which may bear tactic nuclear weapons. The contract is to be executed by Sukhoi.” (Kommersant, “Sanctions Imposed on Russian Companies Linked to Iran,” 08/05/2006)
In summary:
MOSCOW — The United States imposed sanctions against Russian state arms export agency Rosoboronexport and four Russian defense industry enterprises — including the MiG aircraft corporation — for alleged violations of a nonproliferation and missile technology control regime.
The State Department announced the sanctions in a notice posted on the Federal Register. Twenty-three firms across the world, including entities based in China, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, had violated the Iran, North Korea and Syria Nonproliferation Act (INKSNA), it said.
“These entities were sanctioned based on credible information that they have been involved in the transfer or purchase to or from Iran, North Korea or Syria of goods, services or technology listed on multilateral export control lists, US national control lists, or other items that could make a material contribution to the development of weapons of mass destruction or missile proliferation,” said US Embassy Moscow spokesman Will Stevens.
The move prevents any US company or government agency from doing business with the sanctioned Russian defense entities, which include Russia’s state arms export agency Rosoboronexport.
Rosoboronexport is the doorway between Russia’s defense industry and foreign export customers. The agency claimed to have delivered $13.2 billion in military exports last year, and at the MAKS airshow last week said Russia’s export backlog amounts to $40 billion.
The famous MiG aircraft company was among those Russian companies singled out in the latest sanctions action — which closely coincided with the Department of Commerce announcing a new round of economic sanctions in response to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
The other three companies on today’s list were high-precision weapons maker Instrument Design Bureau (KBP) Tula; a rocket and missile design bureau near Moscow known as NPO Mishinostroyenia — the same bureau that designed the USSR’s SS-19 ICBM; and the Katod company in Novosibirsk.
Katod manufactures, among other things, night vision goggles that were sold in the US; the sanctions cut the company off from that market.
In comments carried by the TASS news agency on Wednesday, Katod CEO Vladimir Loktionov mocked the sanctions against his company as a sign that Russian night-vision technology intimidated US competitors.
“So, Russia doesn’t just pump oil, it can also do something that can compete with American companies,” Loktionov said, brushing off any impact the sanctions might have by claiming the majority of its customers are in the Moscow-led Eurasian Economic Union or one of the BRICS nations.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry was furious with the sanctions — both from the State and Commerce departments — responding in a statement later on Wednesday that the US is trying “to punish us for the rigorous pursuit of [our] national interests, and for the free choice of the inhabitants of Crimea and Sevastopol,” to join Russia last year.
Primer: While the United States under the Obama administration paid out $1.7 billion to Iran, still held and blocked is an estimated $1.97 billion in bonds that were or are held by Citigroup. There is additionally real estate property held not only as an embassy in Washington DC, but there is a 36 story office building in New York City owned by an Iranian Foundation known as Alavi. Other properties are located in Texas, California, Virginia, Maryland and other locations in New York City. For the most part these have been frozen by the United States and remain so.
There are 2 key Executive Orders #’s 13438 and 13572 that refer to Islamic State and Iranian Shiite militia operating in Iraq and the IRGC Qods Force and Commander Qasem Soleimani that remain in effect.
Trump’s organization did business with Iranian bank later linked to terrorism
GOP nominee has slammed Clinton for cutting ‘deals with our foreign adversaries’
CPI: Donald Trump’s real estate organization rented New York office space from 1998 to 2003 to an Iranian bank that U.S. authorities have linked to terrorist groups and Iran’s nuclear program.
Trump inherited Bank Melli, one of Iran’s largest state-controlled banks, as a tenant when he purchased the General Motors Building on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, according to public records reviewed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and the Center for Public Integrity. The Trump Organization kept the bank on as a tenant for four more years after the U.S. Treasury Department designated Bank Melli in 1999 as being controlled by the Iranian government.
U.S. officials later alleged that Bank Melli had been used to obtain sensitive materials for Iran’s nuclear program. U.S. authorities also alleged that the bank had been used between 2002 and 2006 to funnel money to a unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard that has sponsored terrorist attacks — a period that overlapped with the time the bank rented office space from Trump.
The Trump Organization’s dealings with the Iranian bank shed more light on Trump’s wide-ranging business interests, which sometimes stand at odds with his blunt declarations on the campaign trail. Trump has denounced Iran as a “big enemy,” blasted Hillary Clinton for not taking a harder line against the Iranian regime and charged that donations from foreign governments to the Clinton Foundation amounted to evidence of corruption. His five-year stint as Bank Melli’s landlord provides an example of the Trump Organization itself doing business with a government hostile to the United States.
“It’s a pretty hypocritical position to take,” said Richard Nephew, who served from 2013 to 2015 as principal deputy coordinator of sanctions policy at the U.S. State Department and spent nearly a decade working on Iran sanctions in the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. “It suggests that his principles are pretty flexible when it comes to him getting paid.”
A court document obtained by ICIJ indicates that Bank Melli’s rent on more than 8,000 square feet on the GM Building’s 44th floor may have topped half a million dollars a year.
The legal ramifications of the Trump Organization taking rent payments from Bank Melli are unclear.
At the time, the U.S. had a sweeping embargo in place which prohibited Americans from doing business with Iran, including receiving rent payments. However, some Iranian organizations were granted licenses exempting specific transactions from sanctions. If the payments were licensed, it may have been legally difficult for the Trump Organization to evict the bank.
The Treasury Department does not publicly disclose individual licenses granting companies exemptions from sanctions rules. The Treasury Department, the Trump campaign and Bank Melli all declined to answer whether the agency had issued a license to the Trump Organization or the bank permitting rent payments during Trump’s ownership of the building.
The Trump campaign declined to answer any questions about Bank Melli for this story, but said Trump would take steps to avoid any conflicts of interest with his business dealings if he is elected president.
“Mr. Trump’s sole focus is and will be on making our country great again,” campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks said in an email. “He has already committed to putting his assets in a blind trust and will have no involvement whatsoever in the Trump Organization.”
Bank Melli did not respond to repeated telephone and email inquiries by ICIJ to its offices in Tehran, London and Paris.
Bank Melli’s office in the GM Building was listed by the Treasury Department among financial institutions “owned or controlled” by the Iranian government and subject to U.S. economic sanctions, according to the Code of Federal Regulations from the years 1999 through 2003. Trump owned the GM Building from July 1998 until September 2003, New York City property records show.
Under U.S. sanctions rules, Bank Melli was forbidden from conducting banking transactions within the U.S., but the bank may have maintained its New York offices in the hope that the U.S. government would someday ease sanctions against Iranian businesses.
The bank moved out of the GM Building sometime after 2003. A spokesperson for Boston Properties, Inc., which is currently the building’s majority owner, said Bank Melli was not a tenant when Boston Properties and other partners bought the building in 2008.
Bank’s ties to terror
U.S. sanctions against Iran date back to the Iranian Revolution in 1979, when Islamic fundamentalists seized power and held more than 50 Americans hostage for more than a year. After briefly lifting restrictions when the hostages were released, President Ronald Reagan designated Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism and imposed new sanctions in 1984 and 1987.
At the time, Donald Trump called for the U.S. take a tougher line against the Iranian regime.
In 1987, he suggested in a speech in New Hampshire that the U.S. should attack Iran and seize some of its oil fields to hit back for what he described as Iran’s bullying of America.
“I’d be harsh on Iran. They’ve been beating us psychologically, making us look a bunch of fools,” Trump told The Guardian in 1988. “It’d be good for the world to take them on.”
In the years that followed, Iran stepped up its support for international terrorist attacks, according to authorities in the U.S. and other Western nations.
In 1994, a suicide bomber killed 85 people at a Jewish center in Buenos Aires, an attack that Argentine prosecutors later charged was coordinated by the Iranian government.
In 1996, a truck bomb killed 19 American servicemen at the Khobar Towers apartment complex in Saudi Arabia. A U.S. court later held that the bombing had been “planned, funded, and sponsored by senior leadership in the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
As Iran supported terror attacks abroad, the U.S. moved to punish the regime economically. President Bill Clinton approved a sweeping embargo in 1995 that banned Americans from conducting trade with Iranian businesses.
Bank Melli, one of Iran’s largest state-owned banks, had long had an office in the GM Building in midtown Manhattan. In 1998, Trump’s real estate organization bought the building and inherited Bank Melli as a tenant.
It is not clear if Trump knew personally that Bank Melli was renting an office from his company, but he was the Trump Organization’s chairman and president, and has described himself as a hands-on manager who pays attention to details.
Nephew, who worked on sanctions and nuclear nonproliferation issues for the U.S. government from 2003 to 2015, said there was less awareness in the 1990s about Iran’s nuclear program and the role of banks in financing terrorism. But he said that accepting payments from Bank Melli should have raised a red flag, even in 1998.
“Should someone in America have known better than to do business with Iran? Yeah,” Nephew said.
George Ross, the longtime executive vice-president of the Trump Organization, said he was not aware that Bank Melli had been a Trump tenant.
“We had any number of tenants in the GM Building,” Ross said in a brief telephone interview. “They might have been in there, but I have no knowledge of them.”
Emanuele Ottolenghi, an expert on Iran at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, said that it was “remarkable” that the Trump Organization had kept Bank Melli as a tenant for four years after the Treasury Department had listed the bank as an Iran-controlled entity.
“I just don’t think that a company of that size and means should be able to hide behind a ‘we didn’t know’ kind of argument,” Ottolenghi said.
In 2007, U.S. authorities charged that Bank Melli had facilitated purchases for Iran’s nuclear program, and that it had been used to send at least $100 million to the Quds Force, the feared special operations unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.
The Quds Force was designated as a supporter of terrorism by President George W. Bush weeks after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, for providing support to the Taliban, Hamas and Hezbollah, groups that the U.S. has labeled as terrorist organizations.
Bank Melli played an important role in Iran’s nuclear program and support for international terrorism in the years before it was singled out by Treasury in 2007, experts told ICIJ.
“It was allowing the entities that were shopping for the regime to make payments,” said Ottolenghi, who described Bank Melli as “critical” to Iran’s past nuclear and terrorist activities.
A representative for Glodow Nead Communications, a public relations firm representing the Trump Organization, told an ICIJ reporter that the Trump Organization would only comment if the story was positive. She declined as a matter of policy to provide contact information for any of its employees.
The Trump Organization continued renting office space to Bank Melli until the insurance company Conseco, which had provided financing for the 1998 purchase, took control of the GM Building in 2003 and sold it to the Macklowe Organization, a New York City real estate developer.
Trump talks Iran
As a presidential candidate, Trump has been a fierce critic of Iran, denouncing its government as “the world’s top state sponsor of terrorism.” He has vowed to take a more warlike posture against the regime, threatening on Sept. 9 to shoot Iranian ships out the water if their sailors made rude gestures toward U.S. Navy ships.
Last week, during the first of three face-to-face debates with Clinton, Trump panned the United States’ 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, calling it “one of the worst deals ever made by any country in history.”
In June, a statement by the Trump campaign blasted Clinton for her work in support of the Iran nuclear deal after the airline Iran Air struck an agreement to purchase aircraft from Boeing, a company that has contributed to the Clinton Foundation.
“This is another example of Clinton’s pay-to-play governing style,” the Trump campaign said. “She will cut deals with our foreign adversaries as long as they are willing to line her pockets.”
At the same time, news reports published in the course of the presidential campaign have shown that the Trump Organization has been entangled with a number of foreign governments that are hostile to the United States.
Trump tried to raise money for the Trump Organization from the regime of Muammar Qaddafi, the Libyan dictator who provided support for the 1988 Pan Am flight bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, that killed 189 Americans, Buzzfeed News reported in June.
A company owned by Trump violated the embargo against Cuba with a business trip to the island in 1998, shortly before he gave a speech in Miami expressing his support for the embargo, Newsweek reported in September. In addition, Bloomberg News has reported that Trump Organization executives may have also violated the Cuban embargo by scouting out a possible investment in a golf course near Havana in late 2012 or early 2013. The deal ultimately fell through, according to the report.
The Trump Organization has also made millions selling apartments to the government of Saudi Arabia, the New York Daily Newsreported in September. The Saudi government is formally a U.S. ally but is suspected of supporting militant Islamic groups, and Trump has called on the Clinton Foundation to return Saudi donations because of the government’s poor human rights record.
Other Trump Organization entanglements in India, Russia and Dubai create conflicts of interest that could threaten American national security if Trump becomes president, Newsweekreported in September.
Information on all of these ventures is limited because Trump has not released his tax returns. He is poised to become the first major party candidate not to do so by Election Day since Richard Nixon in 1972.
Trump pledged on Sept. 15 that he would “absolutely sever” his connections with the Trump Organization if he is elected president. “I will sever connections, and I’ll have my children and my executives run the company and I won’t discuss it with them,” he said on the television program “Fox and Friends.”
Sasha Chavkin is a staff writer and Michael Hudson is a senior editor at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Dave Levinthal is senior political reporter at the Center for Public Integrity.
The White House published document on the Iran deal including those alleged ‘snapback’ sanctions, which will never happen. Given the huge infusion of cash into Iran, their economy and infrastructure will become more harden to any actions or damage future sanctions as is the objective, including snapback sanctions.
U.S. Signed Secret Document to Lift U.N. Sanctions on Iranian Banks
Administration backed measures on the same day Tehran released four American citizens from prison
WSJ: WASHINGTON—The Obama administration agreed to back the lifting of United Nations sanctions on two Iranian state banks blacklisted for financing Iran’s ballistic-missile program on the same day in January that Tehran released four American citizens from prison, according to U.S. officials and congressional staff briefed on the deliberations.
The U.N. Security Council’s delisting of the two banks, Bank Sepah and Bank Sepah International, was part of a package of tightly scripted agreements—the others were a controversial prisoner swap and transfer of $1.7 billion in cash to Iran—that were finalized between the U.S. and Iran on Jan. 17, the day the Americans were freed.
Brett McGurk, a senior State Department official, signed three documents with a representative of the Iranian government in Geneva on the morning of Jan. 17 that set out commitments for a prisoner swap, a cash transfer to Iran and the delisting of sanctions on two Iranian banks, according to senior U.S. officials. Photo: mandel ngan/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
The new details of the delisting have emerged after administration officials briefed lawmakers earlier this month on the U.S. decision.
According to senior U.S. officials, a senior State Department official, Brett McGurk, and a representative of the Iranian government signed three documents in Geneva on the morning of Jan. 17.
One document committed the U.S. to dropping criminal charges against 21 Iranian nationals, and Tehran to releasing the Americans imprisoned in Iran.
Another committed the U.S. to immediately transfer $400 million in cash to the Iranian regime and arrange the delivery within weeks of two subsequent cash payments totaling $1.3 billion to settle a decades-old legal dispute over a failed arms deal.
The U.S. agreed in a third document to support the immediate delisting of the two Iranian banks, according to senior U.S. officials. In the hours after the documents were signed at a Swiss hotel, the different elements of the agreement went forward: The Americans were released, Iran took possession of the $400 million in cash, and the U.N. Security Council removed sanctions on Bank Sepah and Bank Sepah International, these officials said.
“Lifting the sanctions on Sepah was part of the package,” said a senior U.S. official briefed on the deliberations. “The timing of all this isn’t coincidental. Everything was linked to some degree.”
A documentary published by Tasnim News Agency, an Iranian media outlet affiliated with the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, claimed in February that Iranian government officials had demanded that Sepah be taken off the sanctions list as part of a deal to release the prisoners.
The Obama administration, under the nuclear deal reached in July 2015, agreed to lift Treasury Department sanctions on Bank Sepah, but U.N. penalties were to remain in place for eight years.
But after the nuclear deal was forged, U.S. officials said, there was a continued dialogue with Iran about the status of the two banks before the deal went into effect in January.
Tehran argued that the banks were critical to the country’s economy and international trade. Bank Sepah is Iran’s oldest bank and one of its three largest in terms of assets. Bank Sepah International, based in London, was key to financing Iran’s international trade before sanctions were imposed.
U.S. officials said there was a desire in Washington to harmonize the U.N. sanctions list with the U.S.’s. And they said Washington believed Iran had earned more sanctions relief because Tehran had been implementing the terms of the nuclear agreement, which called for a major scaling back of its infrastructure and production of nuclear fuel.
“The issue of Bank Sepah has been one of many topics we discussed with Iran in our overall diplomatic discussions,” said a second senior administration official briefed on the deliberations.
Another senior administration official said lifting sanctions on Bank Sepah and its London affiliate was in the spirit of the commitment by the U.S. and other world powers to provide Iran with sanctions relief.
Administration critics and some congressional officials said they believed the move broke the commitments the administration made to Congress about the deal.
The Obama administration had told Congress that under the deal the U.S. would lift sanctions only on companies and individuals tied to Iran’s nuclear development. Sanctions on those involved in missile development were to remain in place, these critics said.
The Obama administration has repeatedly said it is committed to rolling back Iran’s ballistic missile program.
“By agreeing to remove U.N. and EU sanctions eight years early on Iran’s main missile financing bank, the administration effectively greenlighted their nuclear warhead-capable ballistic missile program,” said Mark Dubowitz, a top critic of the Iran nuclear deal at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington think tank.
The U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Bank Sepah, Bank Sepah International and its then-chairman in 2007 for their alleged role in backing Iran’s missile program. The designation didn’t mention what direct role the entities allegedly played in helping Iran’s nuclear program.
At the time, the Treasury said that Bank Sepah and Bank Sepah International had provided financial support to Iranian-state owned companies and organizations developing Iran’s missile program. These included Iran’s Aerospace Industries Organization and the Shahid Hemmat Industries Group.
“Bank Sepah is the financial linchpin of Iran’s missile procurement network and has actively assisted Iran’s pursuit of missiles capable of carrying weapons of mass destruction,” the Treasury said in a January 2007 statement.
Iran has conducted up to 10 ballistic missile tests since the forging of the nuclear agreement in July 2015. The U.N. Security Council has condemned Tehran’s actions but hasn’t moved to impose any new sanctions on the country.In March, the Treasury Department imposed sanctions on two Iranian companies it said were working with Shahid Hemmat Industries.
U.S. officials said the Obama administration closely vetted the activities of all individuals and entities tied to Bank Sepah before supporting the lifting of U.S. and U.N. sanctions.
“We have the ability to quickly reimpose U.S. sanctions if Bank Sepah or any other entity engages in activities that remain sanctionable,” said the second senior U.S. official.
The Obama administration’s decision to send such large amounts of cash to Iran has fueled charges in Congress that the White House paid ransom to Tehran to secure the release of the American prisoners. The White House has repeatedly denied the charge, saying the $1.7 billion settlement saved the U.S. as much as $8 billion that it could have owed Iran if it lost, as was expected, a court proceeding that was taking place in The Hague, Netherlands. The administration has said the cash was used as “leverage” to make sure the American prisoners were released.
The dispute in Washington has only deepened in recent weeks, as senior Pentagon officials, including Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, told Congress in a hearing that they weren’t notified by the White House about the cash transfer. The chairman of the Joints Chief of Staff, Marine Gen. Joe Dunford, said at a hearing last week that he found it “troubling” that the U.S. provided Tehran with so much cash, which he argued could be used for “spreading malign influence.”
The U.S. government wired about $848,000 to Iran in July 2015 in order to settle a dispute over fossils and architectural drawings that are now in Iranian possession, a spokesman from the Treasury Department said. This April, the U.S. also wired roughly $9 million to Iran in exchange for 32 tons of its excess heavy water, which could be used to make a plutonium bomb. Brig. Gen. Mohammad Reza Naqdi, commander of Iran’s Basij militia, said in January that the $400 million payment “was returned for the freedom of the US spy and it was not related to the [nuclear] negotiations.” More here in further detail.
(The heavy water was delivered to Oak Ridge Laboratories in August for domestic use and for sale to other customers including Spellation Neutron Source which is an accelerator operation. The total published cost to purchase Iran’s extra heavy water from the Iranian Arak facility is $8.6 million. It is unclear out of what agency budget this money was paid, including the Department of Defense or the Department of Energy.
Obama Admin ‘Laundered’ U.S. Cash to Iran Via N.Y. Fed, Euro Banks
Congressman: ‘Administration laundered this money in order to circumvent U.S. law’
FreeBeacon: A member of the House Intelligence Committee is accusing the Obama administration of laundering some $1.7 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars to Iran through a complicated network that included the New York Federal Reserve and several European banks, according to conversations with sources and new information obtained by the lawmaker and viewed by the Washington Free Beacon.
New disclosures made by the Treasury Department to Rep. Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.), a House Intelligence Committee member, show that an initial $400 million cash payment to Iran was wired to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY) and then converted from U.S. dollars into Swiss francs and moved to an account at the Swiss National Bank, according to a copy of communication obtained exclusively by the Free Beacon.
Once the money was transferred to the Swiss Bank, the “FRBNY withdrew the funds from its account as Swiss franc banknotes and the U.S. Government physically transported them to Geneva” before personally overseeing the handover to an agent of Iran’s central bank, according to the documents.
These disclosures shine new light on how the Obama administration moved millions of dollars from U.S. accounts to European banks in order to facilitate three separate cash payments to Iran totaling $1.7 billion.
The latest information is adding fuel to accusations the Obama administration arranged the payment in this fashion to skirt U.S. sanctions laws and give Iran the money for the release of U.S. hostages, in what many have called a ransom.
Congress has been investigating the circumstances surrounding the payment for months and said the administration is blocking certain requests for more detailed information about the cash transaction with Iran.
“By withholding critical details and stonewalling congressional inquiries, President Obama seems to be hiding whether or not he and others broke U.S. law by sending $1.7 billion in cash to Iran,” Pompeo told the Free Beacon. “But Americans can plainly see that the Obama administration laundered this money in order to circumvent U.S. law and appease the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
As new details emerge, congressional critics such as Pompeo and Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) are beginning to suspect the U.S. government laundered the money in order to provide Tehran with immediate access.
“Think about this timeline: the U.S. withdraws $400 million in cash from the Swiss National Bank and then physically transports it to another city to hand-off to Iranian officials—three days before Iran releases four American hostages,” Pompeo said. “But it gets worse: less than a week after this, the U.S. again sends hordes of cash to Iran. As we speak, Iran is still holding three more Americans hostage and I fear what precedent this administration has set.”
The initial $400 million payment to Iran was initiated on Jan. 14, 2016, according to information sent by the Treasury Department to Pompeo.
“For the first settlement payment in January, Treasury assisted the Defense Finance and Accounting Services (DFAS) in crafting a wire instruction to transfer the $400 million in principal from the Iran FMS [Foreign Military Sales program] account on January 14, 2016,” the document states.
“Treasury worked with DFAS and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY), which was acting as Treasury’s financial agent, so that the funds were converted from dollars to Swiss francs and credited to a FRBNY account at the Swiss National Bank (SNB), which is the central bank of the Switzerland [sic],” it adds.
The U.S. hostages were released shortly after Iran received this initial cash payment.
The additional $1.3 billion cash payment was facilitated by the Dutch Central Bank, which helped the United States transfer the money to an account before it was converted into euros.
The Dutch Bank “then disbursed the funds as euro banknotes in the Netherlands to an official from the Central Bank of Iran.”
The payment was broken down into two separate transactions that occurred on Jan. 22 and Feb. 5.
Senior administration officials maintain that the transaction was completely legal and not paid out as part of a ransom to Iran. These officials have said that cash was the “most reliable” method to ensure Iran received immediate access to the funds, as its banking system is still under sanctions.
Officials from the Treasury and Justice Departments would not respond to Free Beacon requests for comment about the exact type of legal approval given prior to the cash payment.
One congressional adviser who works closely on the Iran issue told the Free Beacon that the Obama administration appears to have involved multiple branches of the government in order to help conceal the cash payment to Iran.
“It looks as if the White House made just about every corner of the executive branch complicit in covering up the extent of its payments to Iran,” the source said. “Congress was already aggressively looking into payments involving the State, Treasury, and Energy Departments. Now it’s the Justice Department, too. We already know that top officials from Justice objected strongly to the ransom deal, but were overruled. Congress wants to know what happened and why.”
A senior congressional aide familiar with investigations regarding the matter told the Free Beacon that the administration continues to hide information from lawmakers about the cash payment.
“The American public and Members of Congress understand psychology—if the administration is hiding something, there is a reason. President Obama, Secretary Kerry and others would like to pretend that their months of evasiveness and stonewalling regarding Iran are normal, but their behavior indicates otherwise” the source said. “Refusing to answer basic questions about millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars paid to the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism only invites more questions.”
Recent reports have raised questions about how much of this money may be spent to fund Iran’s international terror operations and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Lawmakers examining who in Iran assumed control of the money have told the Free Beacon that at least part of the cash was likely spent to fund the IRGC’s operations.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), among other lawmakers, has petitioned the Obama administration to disclose the names of the U.S. and Iranian officials who played a role in the cash handoff.
“What U.S. official(s) escorted the pallets of cash to Iranian officials and what entity of the Iranian government received the funds and controlled the flight(s) that transported the cash to Iran?” Rubio asked in a Sept. 10 letter to the administration.
“Please provide a list of the Iranian officials present at the exchange of cash and include the Iranian government entities that employed them, including any past or current connections to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence,” Rubio wrote.
Lawmakers working to unearth further details about the exchange told the Free Beacon that it appears increasingly likely that the IRGC played a role in the cash exchange.
“For the Obama administration to argue that the IRGC was somehow not involved in the U.S. transfer of $1.7 billion—or more—in cash to Iran is totally unconvincing,” Rep. Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.), a member of the House Intelligence Committee, told the Free Beacon. “Given the IRGC’s extensive control of the Iranian economy, and its vast influence with Iran’s regime, it was most likely influential in the set-up and execution of the payment. Like other malicious actors, the IRGC is eager to get its hands on cash to fund its terrorist activities.”
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Congressional questions to Treasury begins. Treasury admits to what? Nothing….
Rubio said his new bill “would stop the Obama administration from making any further payments to Iran from the [Treasury Department’s] Judgment Fund until Iran returns the ransom money it received and pays the American victims of Iranian terrorism what they are owed.”
“President Obama may have attempted to appease our enemy with pallets of cash secretly delivered on an unmarked cargo plane, but Iran continues to cheat on the nuclear deal, harass our military, hold Americans hostage, and fund terrorism around the world,” Rubio added. “Iran should be held accountable, and the Obama administration’s misguided policies must be stopped.”
Rubio’s bill, called the No Ransom Payments Act, is co-sponsored by Sens. John Cornyn (R., Texas), Mark Kirk (R., Ill.), Kelly Ayotte (R., N.H.), John Barrasso (R., Wyo.), and Shelley Moore Capito (R., W.Va.).
“Congress is taking a clear stand—demanding Iran return the more than $1 billion the Obama Administration wrongly gave them and putting a stop to any and all future money this administration, or any administration might want to give to state sponsors of terrorism like Iran,” Pompeo, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, told the Free Beacon. “The American people know this is an unacceptable use of their taxpayer dollars and we wholeheartedly agree. It is unprecedented and dangerous for President Obama to be doling out millions to the Islamic Republic of Iran—in the dead of night, under wraps, and in cash. Kansans expect and demand better from their government.” More from FreeBeacon.
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