Iran unfazed by new US tariffs

TEHRAN: ‘SOONER OR LATER, THEY WILL BECOME AWARE OF THE FUTILITY OF THEIR SCHEMES’

Washington is convinced the Islamic state bankrolls terrorist organisations.

Tehran

Iran’s foreign ministry denounced the latest US Treasury sanctions as “fruitless and senseless” yesterday. “These fruitless, senseless and ineffective sanctions ... will undoubtedly never achieve the desired outcome of their designers and enforcers,” it said. “Sooner or later, they will become aware of the futility of their schemes.”

Washington slapped fresh sanctions on Tehran on Tuesday, accusing it of creating a complex web of Russian cut-out companies and Syrian intermediaries to ship oil to Damascus, which, in turn, bankrolled Hezbollah and Hamas.

The US considers both Hezbollah, a heavily armed Lebanese militia, and Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group that controls the Gaza Strip, to be terrorist organisations.

The US Treasury said Tehran, “working with Russian companies, provides millions of barrels of oil to the Syrian government” of President Bashar al-Assad.

“The Assad regime, in turn, facilitates the movement of hundreds of millions of US dollars to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – Qods Force – for onward transfer to Hamas and Hezbollah,” it said, referring to Iran’s main foreign military operations unit. The new sanctions also target a Syrian national Mohamed Alchwicki and his Russia-based company Global Vision Group.

Alchwicki is accused of playing a central role both in the transfer of oil to Syria and the funneling of money to the militant groups.

The US said his company had illegally received transfers of funds from the Iranian Central Bank via a set of complex transactions.

Intermediary firms involved in the plot to obscure the real destinations of the oil and the money included a subsidiary of the Russian ministry of energy, according to the US Treasury.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned that there were “grave consequences for anyone shipping oil to Syria, or trying to evade US sanctions on the Islamic Republic’s terrorist activities.”

He added that Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei “should decide if spending the Iranian people’s money on his people is more important than investing in Assad, Hezbollah, Hamas and other terrorists”. –