Iran always finds ways to skirt around sanctions: US Treasury

The United States Treasury Department says Iran is always finding ways to evade sanctions imposed against it over its nuclear energy program.

Director of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control Adam Szubin said on Thursday that Iran was using private exchange houses and trading companies in third countries to skirt the embargoes.

“Increasingly we’re seeing them turn to trading houses in third countries to facilitate movement of money that would ordinarily go through a bank,” he said.

“This is an evolving and emerging threat,” Szubin stated. “Two years ago we saw little of this because Iran was able to find banks that were able to handle its business.”

At the beginning of 2012, the US and the European Union imposed new sanctions on Iran’s oil and financial sectors with the goal of preventing other countries from purchasing Iranian oil and conducting transactions with the Central Bank of Iran.

The illegal US-engineered sanctions were imposed based on the unfounded accusation that Iran is pursuing non-civilian objectives in its nuclear energy program.

Iran rejects the allegations, arguing that as a committed signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), it has the right to use nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.

In addition, the IAEA has conducted numerous inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities but has never found any evidence showing that Iran’s civilian nuclear program has been diverted to nuclear weapons production.