wave of sanctions<\/a> against Iran, targeting people and entities it says are involved in illicit fund transfers that benefit the country\u2019s military activities.<\/p>\nThe US Department of the Treasury\u2019s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) confirmed on Tuesday that it had sanctioned more than a dozen Iranian individuals and companies based in Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates.<\/p>\n
Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of list<\/p>\n
Those targeted, the OFAC said, had helped to move funds for the benefit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the Iranian Ministry of Defence.<\/p>\n
Some of the money came from the sale of Iranian oil, the US Treasury added.<\/p>\n
\u201cIranian \u2018shadow banking\u2019 networks like these \u2014 run by trusted illicit financial facilitators \u2014 abuse the international financial system, and evade sanctions by laundering money through overseas front companies and cryptocurrency,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n
John K Hurley, the US Treasury\u2019s undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, added that the Trump administration would continue to disrupt money flowing into \u201cIran\u2019s weapons programmes and malign activities in the Middle East and beyond\u201d.<\/p>\n
The US government alleges that Iranian nationals Alireza Derakhshan and Arash Estaki Alivand, who are both on the new sanctions list, facilitated the purchase of $100m worth of cryptocurrency for the Iranian government.<\/p>\n
As a result of the sanctions, they and the other people and entities being targeted lose their right to any assets held in the US. US companies and citizens are also forbidden from doing business with them.<\/p>\n
The move comes as part of US President Donald Trump\u2019s goal of driving Iran\u2019s oil exports \u201cto zero\u201d.<\/p>\n
Tehran has not yet responded to the move.<\/p>\n
In August, the US went after a global network of companies owned by the Greek shipper Antonios Margaritis.<\/p>\n
\u201cMargaritis has leveraged his decades of experience in the shipping industry to illicitly facilitate the transportation and sale of Iranian petroleum,\u201d the US Treasury claimed.<\/p>\n
The targeting of Margaritis followed several<\/a> other rounds of sanctions designed to make it more challenging for Tehran to sell its oil overseas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The latest US Treasury Department move comes as part of efforts to make it more difficult for Iran…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":161392,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,12,801,129,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":{"0":"post-161391","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-donald-trump","10":"tag-iran","11":"tag-middle-east","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-united-states-of-america","15":"tag-unitedstates","16":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","17":"tag-us","18":"tag-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=161391"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161391\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/161392"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=161391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=161391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}