Banking Is Center Stage as Iran Seeks Nuclear Deal That Delivers
Golnar Motevalli, 09 May 2021
Iran is pushing for its banking industry to be given guaranteed and conclusive sanctions relief at talks to restore the country’s nuclear deal with world powers.
“The removal of sanctions against the central bank, Iranian banks, SWIFT, and any money transfer between them and major foreign correspondent banks, needs to be verified,” Abdolnaser Hemmati, the governor of the Central Bank of Iran, said in answers to written questions, referring to restrictions on Iranian access to the Belgium-based global payments system.
Hemmati said that officials from the central bank are directly involved in the talks to ensure U.S. sanctions removal is tangible. Negotiations resumed in Vienna on Friday in an attempt to rebuild the 2015 agreement struck by Tehran and a group of six leading nations.
That accord wasn’t enough to persuade European banks to work with Iran, even before the Trump administration abandoned it in 2018. Most sanctions imposed over the Islamic Republic’s atomic program were lifted; but U.S. penalties linked to other longstanding issues, such as Tehran’s ties to groups designated as terrorists by Washington, weren’t.
Global lenders feared running afoul of regulations and risking multi-million dollar fines, as banks in South Korea and the U.K. have found to their cost. Iranian officials soon complained that the residue of U.S. sanctions was still harming their ability to bank with the world.
