ExxonMobil and Iran did business under State nominee Tillerson

ExxonMobil did business with Iran, Syria and Sudan through a European subsidiary while President- elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of State was a top executive of the oil giant and those countries were under U. S. sanctions as state sponsors of terrorism, Securities and Exchange Commission filings show.

That connection is likely to surface Wednesday at a hearing for ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The sales were conducted in 2003, 2004 and 2005 by Infineum, in which ExxonMobil owned a 50% share, according to SEC documents unearthed by American Bridge, a Democratic research group.

ExxonMobil told USA TODAY the transactions were legal because Infineum, a joint venture with Shell Corp., was based in Europe and the transactions did not involve any U. S. employees.

The filings, from 2006, show that the company had $ 53.2 million in sales to Iran, $ 600,000 in sales to Sudan and $ 1.1 million in sales to Syria in those three years.

Tillerson became a senior vice president at ExxonMobil in August 2001, and chairman and chief executive Jan. 1, 2006.

The SEC letter questioned ExxonMobil’s failure to disclose that it had transactions with three state sponsors of terrorism.

Compared with Exxon’s overall annual revenue of $ 371 billion, “these transactions are not material by any reasonable measure,” Richard Gutman, ExxonMobil’s assistant general counsel at the time, wrote in response to an SEC inquiry.

“These are all legal activities complying with the sanctions at the time,” Alan Jeffries, media manager at ExxonMobil, told USA TODAY. “We didn’t feel they were material because of the size of the transactions.”

Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations panel, said he was “deeply skeptical about Mr. Tillerson’s actions as CEO of Exxon that were in direct contravention to express United States policies put in place to secure Americans and our country.”