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TOP
STORIES
BP has opted out of
the first wave of agreements to develop oil and gas reserves in Iran
after the lifting of international sanctions - setting it apart from
its two biggest European rivals Royal Dutch Shell and Total... BP has
not applied to take part in a forthcoming tender of exploration and
production rights in Iran, according to people briefed on the matter,
and has no immediate plans for separate agreements of the kind
reached by Shell and Total. These people said the main reason was
commercial. "It's a question of where the best returns on
investment can be made and BP has plenty of attractive opportunities
elsewhere," said one. However, these people acknowledged the
continued existence of some US sanctions against Iran - and the
prospects of a hardline stance against Tehran by the Trump
administration - was a particular deterrent for BP. Although based in
the UK, BP has the biggest US exposure of any European oil group;
about 40 per cent of its shareholders and 30 per cent of its
employees are American, including Bob Dudley, chief executive.
Iran's rial hit a
record low against the U.S. dollar on [December 26] in a sign of
concern about the country's ability to attract foreign money after
U.S. president-elect Donald Trump takes office. The rial was quoted
in the free market at 41,500 to the dollar, weakening from around
41,250 on Sunday and 35,570 in mid-September. Before this month, the
record low was about 40,000, hit in late 2012, traders said...
Inflows since January have been smaller than the government expected,
partly because big international banks fear running into U.S. legal
trouble if they deal with Iran. Many analysts think Washington will
stop short of abolishing the deal, but it may apply remaining
sanctions on Tehran more stringently. At the very least, uncertainty
over Washington's intentions could make companies around the world
more cautious about trading with or investing in Iran.
In the three years
since a preliminary nuclear deal was struck with Iran, Tehran has
received more than $10 billion in sanctions relief from around the
world in the form of cash and gold, according to current and former
U.S. officials... Some U.S. lawmakers and Middle East allies contend
that the shipments of cash and gold, a highly liquid form of money,
can be used to fund Iran's allies in the region, including the Assad
regime in Syria, the Lebanese militia Hezbollah and the Houthi
political movement in Yemen.
IRAN
NUCLEAR DEAL
Dozens of the
nation's top scientists wrote to President-elect Donald J. Trump on
Monday to urge him not to dismantle the Iran deal, calling it a
strong bulwark against any Iranian bid to make nuclear arms. "We
urge you to preserve this critical U.S. strategic asset," the
letter read. The 37 signatories included Nobel laureates, veteran
makers of nuclear arms, former White House science advisers and the
chief executive of the world's largest general society of
scientists... The letter writers zeroed in on the dismantling of
Iran's ability to purify uranium, a main fuel of nuclear arms that is
considered the easiest to use. They said... the time it would take
Tehran to enrich uranium for a single nuclear weapon "has
increased to many months, from just a few weeks" during the
accord's negotiation. The "many months" wording is more
conservative than that of the Obama administration, which hailed the
deal as keeping Iran a year away from having enough nuclear fuel to
make a bomb. Still, the letter writers seemed to anticipate quibbles
on the point by saying the teams of inspectors and monitoring gadgets
at Iran's main enrichment plant made them "confident that no
surprise breakout at this facility is possible." Breakout refers
to a rush to build a nuclear weapon.
NUCLEAR
& BALLISTIC MISSILE PROGRAM
New reviews of
satellite images suggest North Korea may possess another missile
launching site at a village once suspected of having nuclear
facilities. The images, analyzed by Strategic Sentinel, a firm that
deals with geospatial image processing, intelligence analysis and
geopolitical research, exposed a missile silo in mountainous
Geumchang-ri, North Pyongan province, where the U.S. intelligence
community said in the late 1990s there was a nuclear weapons site...
The silo, an underground chamber used for storing and firing
missiles, seems analogous to the one at a missile base in Tabriz,
Iran, with the same 7.4-meter-wide sliding cover and the same type of
exhaust vents, the intelligence consultancy told VOA on Tuesday...
"If this Iranian site is housing missiles and the North Korean
site that we have uncovered is the exact same dimension, then it's
quite possible that the site that we have uncovered is housing
missiles as well," said Ryan Barenklau, founder of Strategic Sentinel.
He also suggested a possible nuclear cooperation between the two
countries.
U.S.-IRAN
RELATIONS
When the shah of
Iran fell in 1979, the U.S. froze at least $400 million of Iranian
money sitting in a Pentagon trust fund. The Islamic Republic of Iran
never stopped trying to get it back... No administration agreed to
surrender all the money, until Jan. 17, shortly after four American
citizens were released from Iranian jails in a prisoner exchange.
That is when an Iranian government Boeing 737 lifted off from
Geneva's Cointrin airport carrying $400 million-stacks of Swiss
francs delivered on wooden pallets earlier that day by the U.S.
government. The history of the frozen money, based on interviews with
U.S., Iranian and European officials involved in the negotiations
over the decades, shows how it has been a constant sore point between
the two countries since the 1979 Iranian revolution. That sore spot
finally has been removed, although in keeping with the four-decade
pattern, it has been replaced by other financial grievances and more
American detainees, suggesting similar dramas may lie ahead... Over
the past 18 months, Iran has detained at least three more American
citizens for allegedly threatening the country's national security.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani wants the U.S. to return another
chunk of Iranian money, $2 billion frozen in 2009 in a Citibank
account in New York. He has suggested that a deal similar to the one
involving the $400 million could resolve the issue.
BUSINESS
RISK
Turkmenistan
stopped gas exports to Iran on Sunday in a long-running dispute over
arrears, Iran's state gas company said, days after Tehran said the
issue had been temporarily resolved... Tehran said in December that
Turkmenistan had threatened to stop gas exports because of arrears,
which amounted to about $1.8 billion and dated back more than a
decade. Iran wanted to refer the issue to arbitration.
SANCTIONS
RELIEF
Iran said on Sunday
it had negotiated to pay only about half the announced price for 80
new Boeing airliners in an order that the American planemaker had
said was worth $16.6 billion... Despite Iran's great need for new
planes to replace those from the sanctions era, it has entered the
market at a time when Boeing, Airbus and smaller planemakers have all
faced a downturn in orders, and are therefore expected to offer deep
discounts.
Iran and European
planemaker ATR are due to sign a deal next week for the purchase of
20 short-haul passenger aircraft, an Iranian official said on
Saturday, weeks after Tehran finalised deals with Boeing and Airbus.
ATR, co-owned by Airbus and Italy's Leonardo Finmeccanica, in
February reported preliminary orders from Iran for 20 twin-engine
turboprop ATR 72-600 aircraft... [the official] added that the
contract for 20 planes was worth $400 million.
Iran has named 29
companies from more than a dozen countries as being allowed to bid
for oil and gas projects using the new, less restrictive Iran
Petroleum Contract (IPC) model, the oil ministry news website SHANA
reported on Monday. The list of pre-qualified firms included Shell,
France's Total, Italy's Eni, Malaysia's Petronas and Russia's Gazprom
and Lukoil, as well as companies from China, Austria, Japan and other
countries. Iran hopes its new IPC, part of an effort to sweeten the
terms it offers on oil development deals, will attract foreign
investors and boost production after years of sanctions. The list did
not include oil major BP. The Financial Times said BP had opted out
of the bidding because of concerns over possible renewed U.S.-Iran
tensions after President-elect Donald Trump takes office on Jan. 20.
Talks between
Brazil, Iran and India could result in the construction of an oil
refinery and petrochemical plant in one of the South American
nation's poorest states... The state of Maranhao, on Brazil's northern
Atlantic coast, is offering a 5,000-acre site for the project,
according to a senior official in the state's governmen... The
project would require investment of at least $2.5 billion, according
to [a Brazilian federal] legislator, who recently traveled to Tehran
and New Delhi as part of an official delegation from Maranhão.
Iranian oil officials have visited the proposed site twice already, a
local Maranhao official said. Mohammad Ali Ghanezadeh, Iran's
ambassador to Brazil, said in an interview that his government is
"very much interested" and "ready to put money and
energy" into the project. He added that the main obstacle to the
deal are U.S. banking sanctions.
Imports of crude
oil by Iran's four major buyers in Asia in November more than doubled
for a second straight month from a year ago, with purchases by India
and South Korea more than four times higher. Iran's top four Asian
buyers - China, India, South Korea and Japan - imported 1.94 million
barrels per day (bpd) last month, up 117 percent on a year earlier,
government and ship-tracking data showed... Industry sources have
said Iran has been offering discounts to buyers in return for
increasing their purchases... Looking ahead, Iran's crude oil exports
in December are set to fall 8 percent from November to a five-month
low, a source with knowledge of its preliminary tanker schedule said
in mid-December, as lower shipments to China and others in Asia
offset bumper exports to Europe.
The National
Iranian Oil Company has signed new spot oil export contracts with BP
and the Anglo-Dutch Royal Dutch Shell to provide them with oil and
gas condensates, director for international affairs at NIOC said on
Wednesday... A spot contract is a deal for buying or selling a
commodity for settlement (payment and delivery) on the spot date,
which is normally two business days after the trade date. A spot
contract is in contrast with a forward contract where terms are
agreed now but delivery and payment will occur at a future date.
Gaz [s]ays signs
[m]emorandum of understanding with municipal authorities of four
cities in Iran for supply of 900 LIAZ buses. Delivery is scheduled to
begin in 2017.
FOREIGN
AFFAIRS
German prosecutors
have indicted a Pakistani man on charges of spying for an Iranian
intelligence agency. Federal prosecutors said Monday that the
31-year-old, identified only as Syed Mustufa H. due to German privacy
rules, was in contact with the unnamed spy agency since 2011. In a
statement, prosecutors said the man began spying on the former head
of a group that promotes German-Israeli relations by July 2015 at the
latest. He is alleged to have received money in return for passing on
information obtained about the ex-head of the German-Israeli Society.
MILITARY
MATTERS
An Iranian general
said Wednesday that his country's air defenses have warned off
several fighter jets and drones during an ongoing military drill...
the semi-official Tasnim news agency... which is close to Iran's
military, said the aircraft included U.S. fighter jets and drones. In
recent months, the [U.S.] 5th Fleet has complained about interactions
with Iran's military at sea and in the air.
REGIONAL
DESTABILIZATION
Allegations over
Russia and Iran's deepening ties with the Taliban have ignited
concerns of a renewed "Great Game" of proxy warfare in
Afghanistan that could undermine US-backed troops and push the
country deeper into turmoil.
SYRIA
CONFLICT
Syria would be
divided into informal zones of regional power influence and Bashar
al-Assad would remain president for at least a few years under an
outline deal between Russia, Turkey and Iran, sources say. Such a
deal, which would allow regional autonomy within a federal structure
controlled by Assad's Alawite sect, is in its infancy, subject to
change and would need the buy-in of Assad and the rebels and,
eventually, the Gulf states and the United States, sources familiar
with Russia's thinking say... Assad's powers would be cut under a
deal between the three nations, say several sources. Russia and
Turkey would allow him to stay until the next presidential election
when he would quit in favor of a less polarizing Alawite candidate.
Iran has yet to be persuaded of that, say the sources... Iran's
interests are harder to discern, but Ali Akbar Velayati, Iran's
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's top adviser, said Aleppo's
fall might alter a lot in the region. By helping Assad retake Aleppo,
Tehran has secured a land corridor that connects Tehran to Beirut,
allowing it to send arms to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Russian and Western
diplomatic sources say Iran would insist on keeping that corridor and
on Assad staying in power for now.
When Islamic State
collapses in Iraq, a lot will ride on whether the Iraqi Shiite
militias taking part in that campaign will stop at the international
border or will cross into Syria and open a new phase of that
country's war. The Hashed al-Shaabi or Popular Mobilization Forces,
which unite several of Iraq's powerful Shiite militias, were
established to combat Islamic State in mid-2014. At the time, the
regular Iraqi army collapsed as the extremist group seized the
country's second-largest city of Mosul and advanced all the way to
the outskirts of Baghdad, the capital. While technically under the
control of the central government in Baghdad, most of these militias
have been trained and armed by Iran and don't hide their close links
with Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps. On their tanks and armored
vehicles, they often fly banners with portraits of the Islamic
Republic's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Some officials of
the Popular Mobilization Forces have already said that they won't
stop at the border and that they received the blessing of Syrian
President Bashar al-Assad to go after his enemies across the
frontier. Iranian officials, too, have openly spoken about using
these battle-hardened Iraqi militias in the Syrian conflict once
Mosul is finally freed from Islamic State. While Iraqi forces
suffered serious casualties in Mosul, they have already reclaimed a
significant part of the city... Injecting Iraq's Shiite militias into
this overwhelmingly Sunni region would be a recipe for disaster,
cautioned Monzer Akbik, a senior member of the Tayar al-Ghad Syrian
opposition group which is allied with the Kurdish forces.
"Sectarian Shiite militias coming into a Sunni area will ruin
everything," he said. "If that happens, maybe people in the
area will join Daesh so they can go and fight against the Hashed
al-Shaabi."
Russian President
Vladimir Putin and Iran's President Hassan Rouhani agreed in a
telephone conversation on Saturday to continue their close coordination
in trying to end the Syria crisis, the Kremlin said in a statement.
The two men agreed on the importance of a new ceasefire agreement in
Syria brokered by Russia and Turkey and plans for peace talks in the
Kazakh capital Astana, the Kremlin said.
SAUDI-IRAN
TENSIONS
Saudi Arabia should
not be allowed to take part in the Syrian peace process, Iranian
Defence Minister Hossein Dehghan told Russia's state-backed RT TV
station in an interview, according to the RIA news agency... He was
cited as saying that he thought Saudi Arabia's insistence that
President Bashar al-Assad should step down meant Riyadh should not
participate in future Syrian peace talks.
Oman told Saudi
Arabia it will join a Saudi-led military alliance, the kingdom's
official news agency reported, a sign that Iran's closest ally in the
region is ready to improve its ties with the kingdom... Oman's ties
with Saudi Arabia and its allies in the Gulf Cooperation Council have
been strained because of its close relationship with Iran, the
kingdom's biggest regional rival.
HUMAN
RIGHTS
Female sex workers
and homeless drug addicts in Tehran should be "convinced"
to undergo sterilisation to prevent social problems, a deputy
provincial governor in the Iranian capital said on Sunday... Last
week, when images of homeless men and women sleeping in open graves
outside Tehran shocked Iranian society, a cartoonist said on social
media that the women must be sterilised because they give birth to
children with "weak genes". The suggestion by Bozorgmehr
Hosseinpour to "block the misery of poor humans who enter this
world with many diseases, pain and addiction" outraged many
people. Some said it reminded them of "Nazi cleansing"
projects. He later apologised and said the women should be given
consultation for sterilisation "with their own approval."
The controversy quickly turned into a political football with
conservative media accusing Shahindokht Molaverdi, vice president for
women's affairs, of advocating the sterilisation of homeless women --
which she denies... In recent years, there has been a growing crisis
in Tehran where street children are born and sold by homeless or poor
women living in and around the capital. Thousands of such children
are put to work as beggars or street vendors.
The fate of a
hunger-striking activist imprisoned in Iran has sparked a rare
unauthorized protest near the prison where he's being held. Videos
posted online show dozens of people taking part in a protest Monday
supporting Arash Sadeghi... Sadeghi is serving a 15-year sentence.
Amnesty International says he was convicted of "spreading
propaganda against the system" and "insulting the founder
of the Islamic Republic." Sadeghi began his hunger strike after
his wife, Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee, was arrested in late October.
Amnesty says she is serving a six-year prison sentence over an
unpublished fictional story found in her home about a woman burning a
Quran in anger over another woman being stoned to death for adultery.
A British-Iranian
woman being held in an Iranian prison has been released from solitary
confinement, her husband has said. Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 37, was
sentenced in September to five years in prison on secret charges
related to a "soft overthrow" of the country's government
that were not revealed in open court. She had been restricted from
any contact with fellow inmates at Tehran's Evin prison until a week
ago, when she was moved to a general ward, Richard Ratcliffe, her
husband, told the BBC.
Iran has put limits
on who can play the popular Clash of Clans mobile game. A government
committee called for restrictions citing a report from psychologists,
who said it encouraged violence and tribal conflict... Iran has a
history of taking action against popular video games.
DOMESTIC
POLITICS
Mehdi Karroubi, a
leading member of the Iranian opposition who has been under house
arrest for almost six years, announced he is quitting his party,
Iranian media reported on Tuesday. Karroubi and Mir Hossein Mousavi
were reformist candidates during the 2009 presidential election, and
questioned the shock victory of conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
which led to mass protests. Two years later, both leaders ended up
under house arrest for their part in the protests, which regime
leaders still call "the sedition". "Considering my
situation since (2011) and given that I do not know how long this
will last, I ask my friends to accept my resignation," Karroubi,
79, wrote in a letter to his party, according to reformist newspaper
Shargh... Karroubi said his resignation was aimed at preserving the
unity of his party, National Trust, ahead of the presidential
election in May -- despite it being banned since his arrest...
President Hassan Rouhani, a moderate who allied with the reformists
to win power in 2013, has failed to secure the release of Karroubi
and Mousavi as he promised during his campaign.
Photographs of
homeless people sleeping in empty graves outside Iran's capital
shocked even the country's president on Wednesday, and pointed to the
continuing economic struggles gripping the nation... a
Persian-language newspaper... said some 50 men, women and children,
many of them drug addicts, live in the cemetery... Rouhani said the
government cannot accept seeing the homeless living in such
conditions. His comments come ahead of Iran's presidential election
in May, in which Rouhani is expected to seek a second four-year term.
OPINION
& ANALYSIS
Iran's clerical
leaders today possess a nuclear infrastructure that is gradually
expanding and is blessed by the international community. For the
first time in its modern history, Tehran is in a commanding position
from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. Iran's leaders continue
to castigate the United States from their platforms while their
Revolutionary Guards taunt the American armada patrolling
international waters. The incoming Trump administration should not
just tinker with this legacy but cast it aside altogether... Should
the Trump team wish to revisit or even abrogate the JCPOA, they have
sufficient domestic political authority to justify their moves. The
question then becomes: To what type of civilian nuclear program is
Iran entitled? At the moment, Iran is on the path of not just enriching
uranium domestically but industrializing that capacity once the
JCPOA's restrictions expire. The United States should set aside the
agreement's sunset clauses and insist that Iran is entitled only to a
modest and largely symbolic program. Whatever uranium Iran enriches
must be permanently shipped abroad for processing into fuel rods that
are difficult to convert for military purposes. And Iran may never
have advanced centrifuges but must limit itself to small cascades of
primitive machines. An oil-rich Iran does not require an elaborate
nuclear network operating thousands of advanced centrifuges while
accumulating tons of enriched uranium... But revising the JCPOA
should not be the sole objective of a revamped Iran policy. During
both the Obama and George W. Bush administrations, the United States
did not have an actual Iran policy, but rather only a series of
arms-control formulations. The most sensible contribution the Trump
administration can make to regional stability is to conceive a
strategy that stands up to Iran in the region and puts its domestic
regime under stress... Economic sanctions are a critical aspect of
any policy of pressuring the Islamic Republic. The experience of the
past few years has shown that the United States has a real capacity to
shrink Iran's economy and bring it to the brink of collapse. It was
this leverage that the Obama administration forfeited for the sake of
a deficient arms-control accord. And it is this leverage that must be
reestablished and redeployed. Instead of imploring Europeans to
invest in Iran, as John Kerry is doing, we must return to the days of
warning off commerce and segregating Iran from global financial
institutions. Designating the Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist
organization and reimposing financial sanctions could go a long way
toward crippling Iran's economy. Once deprived of money, the mullahs
will find it difficult to fund the patronage networks that are
essential to their rule and their imperial ventures. One of the best
ways of threatening the theocracy is through the power of the purse.
Santa Claus is a
familiar face in Tehran this time of year, at least in the
neighborhoods where people have enough money to share the excitement
of Christmas shopping. But many of those in Iran wanting to share the
Gospel have been living this season in fear, painfully aware that
anyone working to win converts to Christianity, and those Muslims who
embrace its message of salvation, may find themselves charged by the
Islamic Republic with nebulous religious and secular crimes, some of
which carry the death penalty... There are about 150,000 Christians
in Iran, mostly Armenians who live in relative peace with the regime.
They were born Christians, as Iran sees it, and within limits their
rights are respected... But there are also Christians who worship in
what are called "house churches" and are part of
congregations that may include large numbers of people who were born
to Muslim families and converted to Christianity-people whom the
Islamic Republic does not accept and actively persecutes. Altogether,
according to activists, there are about 90 Christians being held in
various Iranian prisons... One of the most infamous cases at the
moment involves Yousef Nadarkhani, a house church pastor of the
Church of Iran, whose tribulations and trials have begun to take on
epic proportions... On May 13 of this year, Nadarkhani was arrested
with three other men-Yasser Mossayebzadeh, Saheb Fadaie and Mohammad
Reza Omidi-converts to Christianity (so, still Muslims as far as the
regime is concerned). Nadarkhani was released on bail, but the other
three remain in prison and were sentenced to 80 lashes for drinking
alcohol. Specifically, they had sipped wine, symbolic of the blood of
Christ, during church services... The latest hearing in the case of
Nadarkhani and the three others was on Dec. 14, and inconclusive.
Their tribulations and their trials will continue-a warning to all in
Iran that the only freedom of religion is the very narrow version
allowed by the Islamic Republic.
[R]ecent days have
seen the addition of a new tool to America's "soft power"
arsenal - one that is liable to prove very useful to the incoming
Trump administration as it crafts its policy toward Iran and other
rogues. On December 6th, the U.S. Senate passed the Global Magnitsky
Human Rights Accountability Act as part of its authorization for 2017
defense spending. The law, championed by Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., is
an outgrowth of a 2012 sanctions law designed to penalize Russian
authorities for the untimely death of Russian lawyer Sergei
Magnitsky... The Global Magnitsky Act, however, has a substantially
broader scope. It expands the menu of penalties envisioned in the
original act - visa bans, asset freezes and commercial blacklists -
beyond Russia, and applies them to any foreign officials found to be
responsible for human rights violations or "significant"
instances of corruption. By doing so, it effectively weaponizes human
rights as a tool of U.S. foreign policy. Iran is a logical test case
for these new restrictions. The Islamic Republic, after all, has long
been a human rights abuser on a global scale. But over the past two
years, the regime's domestic practices have become more repressive
than ever before.
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