The US Treasury Department has issued sanctions against Iran’s Oil Minister Mohsen Paknejad, and some vessels that are part of a fleet involved in the Iranian crude oil exports after the Trump administration sent a letter to the country.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement Thursday that the sanctions designated Paknejad and three entities engaged in the Iranian oil trade in China, and named three shipping vessels as blocked property for their use in the transactions.
Paknejad “oversees the export of tens of billions of dollars’ worth of Iranian oil and has allocated billions of dollars’ worth of oil to Iran’s armed forces for export,” the Treasury said.
The designated vessels include the Hong Kong-flagged Peace Hill and its owner Hong Kong Heshun Transportation Trading Limited, the Iran-flagged Polaris 1, the Seychelles-registered Fallon Shipping Company Ltd, and the Liberia-registered Itaugua Services Inc.
“Today’s action advances President Trump’s policy of maximum pressure” on the Iranian government, US State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said in a statement.
Iran has long been subjected to Western sanctions over its nuclear activities and other pretexts.
The new administration at the White House has escalated these measures since taking office in January, reinstating the so-called maximum pressure policy, a campaign of hybrid warfare targeting the Islamic Republic.
The latest sanctions come after Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi confirmed that Anwar Gargash, the diplomatic advisor to the UAE president, delivered a letter from US President Donald Trump to the Iranian establishment.
Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei on Wednesday said Trump’s withdrawal from a nuclear deal in his first term renders diplomacy with him pointless, dismissing fresh overtures by Washington for a new agreement.
“The US president saying ‘we are ready to negotiate with Iran’ and calling for negotiations is a deception aimed at misleading global public opinion,” he told a group of students visiting him in Tehran.
What this means, the Leader said, is that the US wants to portray itself as open to negotiations and making peace and Iran as not willing to accept it.
“What’s the point of negotiating when we know he won’t stick with it,” Ayatollah Khamenei said, referring to a 2015 international nuclear deal from which Trump withdrew.
In 2015, Iran signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with six world powers. However, the US’s unilateral withdrawal in 2018 and its subsequent re-imposition of sanctions against Tehran left the future of the deal in limbo.
“We sat down and negotiated for several years, and this very person took the completed, finalized and signed agreement off the table and tore it up,” Ayatollah Khamenei said Wednesday.
Negotiations with the current US administration, the Leader said, will not lead to the lifting of sanctions, but “will make the knot of sanctions even tighter”.
Press TV’s website