Top Stories WSJ: "A year after German engineering giant Siemens AG pledged to retreat from Iran under international pressure, it is grappling with a thorny problem: a big jump in revenue in the Islamic republic. Siemens has kept a promise not to pursue new projects in Iran. But its existing contracts there underscore how international efforts to curb Tehran's nuclear ambitions have had only limited impact on the state's ability to draw on the technology and expertise it needs to maintain its broader infrastructure. The company's Iranian business also shows how Tehran depends on a powerful tool to maintain its commercial ties to foreign companies. The rules that govern international commerce make it tough for Siemens to sever ties with Iran even if it wanted to. 'Otherwise we could be accused of breaching contracts and face compensatory damages,' Siemens CEO Peter Löscher said at the company's shareholder meeting in January. The U.S. State Department and the European Union declined to comment on Siemens' business in Iran. In Siemens' last fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, the company's revenue in Iran rose more than 20% to about €680 million ($967 million) from the year before and more than 50% over a two-year period, said people familiar with the matter. Revenue for this year is still unclear." http://t.uani.com/dRorad Reuters: "India has agreed to stop paying for its Iranian oil imports via Germany, a German official said on Tuesday, ending a trade conduit that had drawn strong disapproval from the United States and Israel. The decision was a result of consultations between Berlin and New Delhi, and not pressure from Chancellor Angela Merkel at home or abroad to disrupt the payment scheme, the high-ranking government official said, declining to be named. 'India has told us that this route is being phased out,' he said, confirming newspaper reports indicating that billions of euros of payments to a Hamburg-based bank handling international trade with Iran had been halted. Earlier, Handelsblatt business daily reported that Merkel had intervened by instructing Germany's central bank, the Bundesbank, to stop clearing payments from India headed to the bank, known as EIH, which is under U.S. but not EU sanctions." http://t.uani.com/i0O3wM AP: "President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called on regional rival Saudi Arabia to pull its troops out of Bahrain, where they are helping a Sunni monarchy put down a Shi'ite-led protest movement demanding equal rights and a political voice. Since the wave of Arab unrest hit Bahrain nearly two months ago it has reverberated well beyond the tiny island nation's borders. Its sectarian element - a key difference from other Mideast uprisings - quickly pit Sunni Arab nations on their side of the Gulf against Shi'ite power Iran. 'The Saudis did an ugly thing to deploy troops . . . the Bahraini government also did an ugly work to kill its own people,' Ahmadinejad said at a press conference in Tehran." http://t.uani.com/g5Kk37
Nuclear Program & Sanctions Reuters: "German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu are likely to discuss a German bank providing financial services to Iran when they meet this week, a source said on Monday. Israel and the United States want Germany to shut down the bank, Hamburg-based EIH, saying it supports the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction by handling payments to known participants in Iran's contentious nuclear program. 'I would imagine the Iranian issue will be an agenda item, and among those, I imagine that EIH would be an issue,' an Israeli political source said, declining to be named. 'It would be a good assumption to say they will speak about it.'" http://t.uani.com/ijbi0s Bloomberg: "Germany's Jewish council is seeking the closure of the Europaeisch-Iranische Handelsbank AG for its involvement in the trade of oil between Iran and India, Handelsblatt reported, citing the head of the council. Funds flow from the Indian central bank via the Bundesbank in Frankfurt and from there to the EIHbank and to Iran, Handelsblatt said. The newspaper said the U.S. put the bank on a black list late last year, and cited unidentified officials in the German security service as saying that so far there is no foundation for assuming that the bank finances Iran's nuclear program." http://t.uani.com/gcvC4C Commerce AP: "The Iranian president says current oil prices are too low and predicts they will jump to $150 a barrel soon. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke in Tehran on Monday about several topics. He didn't explain the basis for his prediction. Oil prices jumped to fresh 30-month highs above $108 a barrel Monday as the conflict in Libya extended market concerns about supply risks and signs of a recovering U.S. jobs market bolstered optimism that global crude demand will strengthen. Iran traditionally pushes for higher prices." http://t.uani.com/hXbrXJ Domestic Politics AFP: "Two rebels who were involved in an attack in March which left two members of Iranian security forces dead have themselves been killed, a commander with the elite Revolutionary Guards said on Monday. 'Two rebels who were involved in the attack on 4 Farvardin (March 25) were killed in the northwest of the country,' said General Mohammad Pakpour, without specifying the political affiliation of the two or the circumstances of their deaths, the official IRNA news agency reported." Foreign Affairs WSJ: "Human-rights activists and leaders on Capitol Hill are increasingly criticizing the West's tepid response to the Syrian uprising, saying it squanders a vital chance to weaken President Bashar al-Assad and his alliance with Iran... Mr. Assad is Iran's closest ally in the Arab world and a central partner in Tehran's efforts to fund and arm the militant groups Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories. Syria has also played a major role in facilitating the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq. Many U.S. officials acknowledge that a weakening of Mr. Assad's government, or its collapse, would greatly undermine Iran's ability to project its power across the Middle East." http://t.uani.com/fBLaW7 AFP: "Egypt will not be ruled by 'another (Ayatollah) Khomeini,' the country's military said on Monday, in reference to the cleric who led Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution, the official MENA news agency reported. 'Egypt will not be governed by another Khomeini,' the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces said after a three-hour meeting with newspaper editors-in-chief and MENA. The military rulers made the comment amid concerns over the increased visibility of the Muslim Brotherhood, banned under the regime of president Hosni Mubarak, who stepped down on February 11 after a popular uprising." http://t.uani.com/g2tEQy AFP: "Iran has cut ties with The Louvre, a top official said on Monday, accusing the renowned Paris museum of violating a commitment made to a Tehran heritage body. 'This organisation as of today will cease its cooperation with The Louvre for violating its commitment,' Hamid Baghai, who heads Tehran's Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism Organisation, was quoted by the state television website as saying. 'Based on our agreement, this museum should have sent us some artefacts in order to set up an exhibition here but for unknown reasons they have not,' he added without elaborating." http://t.uani.com/hhWCwi Opinion & Analysis Tariq Alhomayed in Asharq Alawsat: "The danger of Iran in our region is not in any way difficult to prove. In order to see evidence of hostility, and the danger, we only need to look at what Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said yesterday with regards to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, specifically Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. However, let us reflect on some of what Ahmadinejad said yesterday in more detail, in order to show how the Iranian threat is extremely alarming both for the region and the wider world, and not only in terms of political issues. In a press conference held in Tehran, Ahmadinejad said that his country's nuclear plants were safer than their counterparts in Japan, and that the events that occurred in Japan's Fukushima nuclear facility would never happen in Iran. Ahmadinejad justified this viewpoint by saying: 'the technology used in the nuclear plants in Fukushima dates back fifty years, but the technology used in Iranian nuclear plants is completely up to date'! Could anything be more absurd? The Iranian President says that Iran is more advanced than Japan, in terms of the technology used in its nuclear plants, yet everyone saw how Iran stood helpless when faced with the 'Stuxnet' worm virus - a destructive computer program which is believed to have disabled up to five Iranian centrifuges, and helped to thwart Tehran in its quest to produce Iran's first nuclear weapons. We saw the Iranians at the time form a crisis committee, incorporating officials from all concerned departments in order to combat the worm! This is not all of course, during the same press conference Ahmadinejad added: 'as far as I know, the (Fukushima) incident was not caused by the earthquake, but by the tsunami waves. We do not have tsunamis in the Gulf, and therefore there is no cause for concern'! Is this a rational argument, considering we have seen a hurricane strike the Sultanate of Oman, which is part of the Arab Gulf, and is situated opposite Iran in terms of its coastal borders? However, above all that, Tehran does not have the required capacity to deal with an earthquake, for we saw how the whole world rallied to help Iran after the devastating earthquake which struck the country two years ago. Therefore, Ahmadinejad's comments about what happened in Japan alone are evidence of the danger of Iran becoming a nuclear state." http://t.uani.com/fjDi5F |
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