‘Warning’ over Iran sanctions

House votes to bar purchases of heavy water from Tehran

Lightning from a severe storm fills the sky behind a grain elevator in Belvue, Kan, on May 25. The storm produced tornadoes near Chapman, Kan. (AP)

WASHINGTON, May 26, (Agencies): Obama administration officials told US lawmakers on Wednesday they would oppose new sanctions on Iran if they interfere with last year’s international nuclear agreement, laying the groundwork for a potential fight over any legislation.

“If legislation were to undermine the deal, by taking off the table commitments that we had put on the table, that would be a problem,” Adam Szubin, the acting Treasury Department undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, told a House of Representatives hearing.

“Certainly our allies around the world would see us taking back major chunks of the sanctions relief as bad faith,” Szubin told a Senate Banking Committee hearing later on Wednesday.

House and Senate members are drafting new sanctions measures, accusing Iran of supporting terrorism, human rights abuses and violating its international commitments by testing ballistic missiles.

They want to renew the Iran Sanctions Act, a broad US law imposing sanctions over Iran’s nuclear and missile programs that expires at the end of 2016. Administration officials have urged Congress not to rush to renew the ISA.

Lawmakers argue that new sanctions will help send a message that Washington will take a hard line, despite the nuclear pact. Every Republican in Congress and several of President Barack Obama’s fellow Democrats opposed the agreement.

“I feel it’s not so terrible to have Congress come up with new sanctions if we feel Iran is violating its agreements,” said Representative Eliot Engel, top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who opposed the nuclear pact.

Szubin and Stephen Mull, the State Department’s lead coordinator for implementing the nuclear deal, told lawmakers that, so far, the deal announced in July 2015 was being fully implemented. They said the administration was tightly tracking Iran’s compliance.

“We believe that we and our allies in the region are considerably safer,” Mull said.

Members of Congress recently accused the administration of allowing sanctions workarounds that might provide Iran direct or indirect access to the US financial system.

Szubin reiterated the administration’s assurances that it had no such plans.

Despite the easing of nuclear sanctions under the international agreement, Tehran’s hopes of rapidly ending its economic isolation have been complicated by companies’ concerns that doing business with Iran might violate non-nuclear sanctions that remain in place.

Meanwhile, the House voted Wednesday to bar the US government from future purchases of heavy water from Iran, undercutting the controversial nuclear pact with that nation and earning a certain veto threat on a key government funding bill.

Wednesday night’s 251-168 vote came on an amendment by Florida GOP Rep. Ron DeSantis to a funding bill for the Energy Department.

Amendments

A similar amendment died in the Senate after a major dust-up earlier this year, when Democrats filibustered a companion proposal by freshman Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark.

Last month, the Obama administration completed an $8.6 million deal to buy 32 tons of heavy water from Iran. The amendment wouldn’t affect that deal but would thwart purchases next year. Nonetheless, the White House has weighed in strongly with a veto promise that may get the proposal removed during House-Senate negotiations.

The sale will help Iran meet the terms of last year’s landmark deal, in which Iran agreed to curb its atomic program in exchange for billions of dollars in sanctions relief.

Heavy water, formed with a hydrogen isotope, is a key component for one kind of nuclear reactor. It is not radioactive but has research and medical applications and can also be used to produce weapons-grade plutonium. Under the nuclear deal, Iran is allowed to use heavy water in its modified Arak nuclear reactor, but must sell any excess supply of both heavy water and enriched uranium on the international market.

There are no current plans for further US purchases of heavy water. The pending deal calls for the Energy Department’s Isotope Program to purchase the heavy water from a subsidiary of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran. The heavy water will be stored at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and then resold on the commercial market for research purposes.

Earlier, businesses around the world were using the United States as an excuse to avoid doing business with Iran, US Secretary of State John Kerry has said Tuesday as he declared the Islamic Republic “open for business” for European banks.

Kerry said it was unfair and inaccurate for businesses to blame US sanctions for their decision to stay away. He said the US had an obligation to live up to the nuclear deal with Iran by clarifying what’s now permitted as a result of that accord.

“If they don’t want to do business or they don’t see a good business deal, they shouldn’t say, ‘Oh, we can’t do it because of the United States,’” Kerry told reporters in London. “We sometimes get used as an excuse in this process.”

The top US diplomat’s comments came as the US works to address Iran’s complaints that it hasn’t received the sanctions relief it was promised in exchange for rolling back its nuclear program. Under the deal, broad US sanctions on Iran’s economy were removed, clearing the way for foreign companies to do business with most Iranian companies.

Yet some specific Iranian entities, including companies associated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, are still off-limits under sanctions punishing Iran for other behavior. And the US maintains a prohibition on Iran accessing the American financial system or directly conducting transactions in US dollars, fueling confusion and practical impediments given that international transactions routinely cross through the US banking system.