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Top Stories
AP:
"Hasan Rouhani knew there was an element of risk. Just a week before
Iran's election gatekeepers announced the presidential ballot, Rouhani
said one-on-one talks with Washington are the only way for breakthroughs
in the nuclear standoff, given that the United States - as he put it - is
the world's 'sheriff.' Such a public portrayal of America's importance
and the need to make overtures to it undoubtedly rattled a few among
Iran's ruling clerics, who decide which candidates are cleared to run.
Yet they allowed Rouhani to enter the race, and to the surprise of many,
he surged to a runaway victory. Rouhani's repeated emphasis on direct
outreach to Washington may now have a chance for real traction among the
ultimate decision-makers in Iran - the ruling clerics and the powerful
Revolutionary Guard... 'The bottom line is that Rouhani's views are not a
wholesale change from the ruling system's. They are pretty much the same
on all the central points on what Iran wants,' said Mohammad Ali Shabani,
a British-based Middle East expert concentrating on Iranian affairs. 'The
issue is over tactics and how to get there.'" http://t.uani.com/14sFngc
CNBC:
"Wall Street banks are being investigated for transactions that
violated sanctions on Cuba, Iran, Myanmar, Sudan and other countries with
ties to terrorism, New York state's chief financial regulator disclosed
Tuesday. 'When you see that banks are systematically stripping
information from wire transfers to hide the fact that they're doing
business with terrorist nations, it makes your blood boil,' said Benjamin
Lawsky, superintendent of the state's Department of Financial Services,
the new agency that regulates financial services and products. Lawsky
told CNBC's 'Power Lunch' that it's 'surprising' how many banks violate
sanctions, adding that his agency is investigating a 'line-up of other
banks.' He did not specify the number of inquiries, however, or which
banks are being looked at... Last week, the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ
agreed to pay New York $250 million for deleting information from $100
billion in wire transfers with Iran and other nations on the U.S.
sanctions list." http://t.uani.com/12plWSE
RFE/RL:
"In an unusual move, Iran's minister for communications and
information technology, Mohammad Hassan Nami, has acknowledged that the
country restricted the speed of the Internet in the days leading up to
the June 14 presidential election. 'The reduction of the Internet speed,
which some called disturbances, was the result of security measures taken
to preserve calm in the country during the election period,' Nami was
quoted as saying in a June 25 interview with the Tasnim news agency. It's
not clear why the North Korean-educated Nami decided to publicly admit
efforts to slow the Internet, a move widely seen as part of Tehran's
attempts to disrupt the free flow of information. Iran has a record of
slowing down the Internet and increasing online censorship at sensitive
times, but officials rarely acknowledge such efforts. Nami said Iran's
efforts were aimed at preventing 'foreigners trying to disrupt the
election process' from crossing into the country's cyberspace." http://t.uani.com/11HSbRI
Sanctions
BusinessTech
(South Africa): "The Democratic Alliance has raised
further questions relating to MTN's operations in Iran, which have come
under immense scrutiny since initial claims of bribery were brought
against the mobile operator by Turkcell in early 2012. In July 2012, South
Africa suspended Yusuf Saloojee, its former ambassador to Tehran, pending
an investigation into his ties to MTN. Saloojee was named in a Turkcell
suit against MTN for allegedly taking a $200,000 bribe from the SA mobile
operator to help it win an operating license in Iran. However, in October
2012, the DA determined that that the ambassador was back at in post,
while an investigation into acts of bribery was still in progress." http://t.uani.com/10UOl97
Al-Monitor:
"For the first time since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Iran is
offering production-sharing contracts (PSCs) for investment in its
upstream energy field, which involves exploration and production stage of
the hydrocarbons industry. The contracts, which allow oil companies to
more quickly recoup their investment expenses than the buy-back
arrangements Iran had previously favored, could help the Islamic Republic
attract desperately needed new cash and expertise and alleviate the
impact of draconian sanctions and competition from its neighbor, Iraq. The
National Iranian Oil Co. has offered such a contract to an Indian
consortium of three companies: ONGC Videsh Ltd. (OVL), Indian Oil Corp.
Ltd. and Oil India Ltd. This contract is for developing the offshore
Farzad B gas field in the Farsi block in the Persian Gulf. Negotiations
over developing the Farzad B gas field had been in process with the
Indian consortium since early 2009." http://t.uani.com/14x7nQf
Syrian Civil
War
Reuters:
"Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi on Wednesday urged
Qatar's new Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani to revise his country's
policy of backing Syrian rebel groups. 'Hopefully Sheikh Tamim will
contemplate the Syrian issue and regarding past policies, he will make a
serious revision so we will be able to ... join hands and tackle the
Syrian crisis,' Salehi told a news conference in Tehran, broadcast by
Press TV." http://t.uani.com/11HKJ96
Domestic
Politics
Bloomberg:
"When Hassan Rohani won Iran's presidential election this month, he
garnered more votes than when his predecessor swept to power eight years
before. He also gained a larger list of things to fix. Rohani, 64, a
lawyer, cleric and former diplomat, inherits an economy that under
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was defined by falling oil exports because
of international sanctions, accelerating inflation, a currency collapse
and enduring unemployment. He's also confronted by a political scene
marked by squabbling over how to drag Iran out of the mire amid pressure
from the U.S. and European Union over its nuclear program, which Israel
has vowed to curb by any means. 'This Iran is going to be much harder to
manage,' said Cliff Kupchan, director for the Middle East at New
York-based political risk consultants Eurasia Group. 'Rohani has much
more of a mandate than Ahmadinejad had, while the country is in a lot
more trouble today than it was in 2005." http://t.uani.com/11HQJyM
FP:
"A paragraph from the Ph.D. thesis abstract reportedly written by
Iranian President-elect Hassan Rowhani at a Scottish university in the
1990s includes a paragraph that appears to be largely lifted from a book
by a prominent Islamic legal scholar... The Farsi-language website,
Khodnevis.org, run by the Washington, D.C.-based Iranian dissident
blogger Nikahang Kowsar, posted an article today noting that a paragraph
in the Ph.D. thesis appears to be lifted from a book by Mohamed Hashim
Kamali, an prominent Afghan-born Islamic legal scholar who is now the
founding chairman and CEO of the International Institute of Advanced
Islamic Studies in Malaysia." http://t.uani.com/149QfRr
Opinion &
Analysis
Dennis Ross in
NYT: "The election of Hassan Rowhani as Iran's new
president has created a sense that there are new possibilities of
progress on the nuclear issue; we need to respond, but warily. Iran's supreme
leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, allowed Mr. Rowhani to win the election
recognizing that he had run against current Iranian policies that have
isolated the country and invited economically disastrous sanctions...
None of this means there will be a nuclear deal. Even if he were given
the power to negotiate, Mr. Rowhani would have to produce a deal the
supreme leader would accept. So it is far too early to consider backing
off sanctions as a gesture to Mr. Rowhani. We should, instead, keep in
mind that the outside world's pressure on Iran to change course on its
nuclear program may well have produced his election. So it would be
foolish to think that lifting the pressure now would improve the chances
that he would be allowed to offer us what we need: an agreement, or
credible Iranian steps toward one, under which Iran would comply with its
international obligations on the nuclear issue. Our bottom line here is
that Iran must be prepared to change its program so that it does not have
a breakout capability to develop nuclear weapons. The real question for
ourselves is whether we should change our approach to diplomacy with
Iran, now that a new Iranian president has advertised his desires to end
Iran's isolation and the sanctions imposed on it, and to repair the
"wound" that he has said exists between the United States and
the Islamic Republic. Until now, we have taken an incremental,
confidence-building approach within multilateral negotiations with Iran,
but they have probably already run their course. Indeed, while our side
(the United States, China, Russia, Germany, Britain and France)
negotiated with Iran on and off for the last several years with no
results, the Iranians were dramatically expanding the numbers of
centrifuges they had installed to enrich uranium. They now have roughly
17,000 and have succeeded in upgrading to a new generation of far more
efficient centrifuges. Those developments have shrunk the time we have
available to ensure that the Iranians cannot break out and present the
world with the fait accompli of a nuclear weapons capability. So we may
have time for diplomacy, but not a lot. We should move now to presenting
an endgame proposal - one that focuses on the outcome that we, the United
States, can accept on the nuclear issue. And we should do so even if our
negotiating partners - particularly the Russians - aren't prepared to
accept such a move, since the clock is ticking. We should give Mr.
Rowhani a chance to produce, but the calendar cannot be open-ended.
Diplomacy often boils down to two simple elements: taking away excuses
for inaction and providing explanations for a deal that could be struck.
On the first point, the Iranians say they don't know what we will accept
in the end. The answer should be that we can accept Iran's having civil
nuclear power but with restrictions that would make the steps to
producing nuclear weapons difficult, as well as quickly detectable. Our
offer should be credible internationally; if Iran was not prepared to
agree to it, the Iranians would be exposed for not being ready to accept
what they say they want. Indeed, if we make a credible proposal that
would permit the Iranians to have civil nuclear power with restrictions,
it would allow them to save face for themselves: they could say the
proposal was what they had always sought and that their rights had been
recognized." http://t.uani.com/15FmgPk
WSJ Editorial
Board: "When Tony Blair's government established the
U.K. Supreme Court in 2005, we worried that this new institution would
become a vehicle for judicial activism. But who would have suspected it
would start conducting its own foreign policy? Last week the nine-member
court struck down financial sanctions imposed in 2009 against Mellat Bank
of Iran. Until earlier that year, Mellat was wholly owned by the Iranian
state, which still retains a 20% direct stake. The U.S. Treasury added
Mellat to its sanctions list in 2007 and has long maintained that the
bank is a financial conduit for nuclear-weapons programs. Mellat denies
the charges. The U.K. Supremes, however, held that cutting Mellat Bank
off from access to the British financial system was 'irrational' and
'disproportionate.' Irrational because Iran's ayatollahs could use other
banks, including other Iranian banks, to meet their financing needs; and
disproportionate because the U.K. Treasury hadn't proved to the court
that Mellat was complicit in financing nuclear proliferation. In its
opinion, the Court cites two main examples of Mellat's involvement with
Iran's nuclear program but waves them off on grounds that the bank says
it ended those relationships years ago. It also held a closed-door
hearing to examine evidence that the U.K. government didn't want revealed
to the public or the defendant, but the Court concluded that this secret
evidence added nothing important to the case. The Court's majority
opinion includes all the expected niceties about not conducting foreign
policy from the bench, before proceeding to do exactly that." http://t.uani.com/11HPdwv
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Eye on Iran is a periodic news summary from United Against
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