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TOP
STORIES
Small and
midsize companies are rethinking or delaying entry to Iran following
the election of Donald Trump, a break from their bigger counterparts
which have struck recent deals despite concerns of fresh sanctions.
Anubhav Singh, the head of global sales and marketing at South
African telecommunications-equipment maker Afripipes, said his
company was halting its postdeal exploration of the Iranian market as
a result of Mr. Trump's election. "We're waiting to see what
Trump's policies are with respect to Iran and then take it from
there," he said... Smaller companies, because of their size,
can't as easily absorb losses from ventures that have to be scrapped
because of sanctions. In the past, U.S. sanctions have had a chilling
effect on companies dealing with Iran because some of them apply on
any company with American connections.
Iran's president
on Tuesday compared talk of renegotiating its nuclear accord to
"converting a shirt back to cotton," and said U.S.
President-elect Donald Trump's talk of doing so is "mainly
slogans." ... Iran's President Hassan Rouhani told reporters
that "renegotiation has no meaning at all." "Mr. Trump
has so far made many remarks on the deal," he added. "These
are mainly slogans. I do not see it as likely that something happens
in practice." He said the deal is beneficial to the United
States, but that Trump "doesn't understand this." ...
"There will be no negotiations on the nuclear deal,"
Rouhani said. "The deal has been finalized and it was approved
in the U.N. Security Council."
Iran's
persistent use of cruel and inhuman punishments, including floggings,
amputations and forced blinding over the past year, exposes the
authorities' utterly brutal sense of justice, said Amnesty
International. Hundreds are routinely flogged in Iran each year,
sometimes in public. In the most recent flogging case recorded by
Amnesty International, a journalist was lashed 40 times in Najaf
Abad, Esfahan Province, on 5 January after a court found him guilty
of inaccurately reporting the number of motorcycles confiscated by
police in the city. "The authorities' prolific use of corporal
punishment, including flogging, amputation and blinding, throughout
2016 highlights the inhumanity of a justice system that legalizes brutality.
These cruel and inhuman punishments are a shocking assault on human
dignity and violate the absolute international prohibition on torture
and other ill-treatment," said Randa Habib, Amnesty
International's Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa.
"The latest flogging of a journalist raises alarms that the
authorities intend to continue the spree of cruel punishments we have
witnessed over the past year into 2017."
IRAN
NUCLEAR DEAL
Iran's foreign
minister says U.S. President-elect Donald Trump "will be
surprised" if he tries to renegotiate the hard-won nuclear deal
reached by the Obama administration and other world powers with the
Islamic Republic. Mohammad Javad Zarif told a panel at the World
Economic Forum in Davos that he's taking a "wait and see"
attitude about the Trump administration and "The jury is
still... the jury is not even yet convened." Pressed by The
Associated Press afterward on Wednesday, Zarif said it "won't be
the end of the world if he (Trump) tries to walk away from the
deal." "He wants to surprise people, so he will be
surprised," if he does, Zarif said with a smile, without
elaborating. Zarif also criticized the Obama administration, saying
it "did not implement their side of the bargain in a full and
complete way" - notably about unspecified difficulties faced by
Iranian banks.
Mr. Rouhani,
fending off domestic critics, pointed out to his audience that Iran
was now able to sell $70 billion worth of oil until the end of the
Iranian calendar year, on March 20. "Without the deal, that
would have been $32 or $33 billion," he said. "If not for
the deal, where would we have deducted this money from? From nurses',
from teachers' salary? Put health and treatment projects on
hold?" "What were we to do?" he added.
A senior
European Union diplomat said on Tuesday that the foreign policy team
of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump had misunderstood the Iran
nuclear deal and that it was not up for renegotiation... "There
is a misunderstanding that you can renegotiate this agreement. This
cannot be done," Helga Schmid, Secretary General of the European
Union's foreign policy service in Brussels, said of the deal brokered
by the bloc between Iran, the United States, France, Germany,
Britain, Russia and China. "It's a multilateral agreement, that
cannot be renegotiated bilaterally," she said, pointing out that
the deal has also been endorsed by the U.N. Security Council.
The European
Union has informally contacted the incoming Trump administration to
clarify "misunderstanding" about the Iran nuclear deal
which he has threated to scrap, an EU diplomatic source said
Tuesday... "Some informal outreach was done to the new US
administration to explain the added value of the deal," the
source said. "There has been a lot of misunderstanding out there
... It is a multilateral agreement; if one side steps away from it,
the others can do the same." The source said the EU was
determined to stick with the accord and was "working very much
hand in hand with China and Russia on this." "We see this
deal as very important, as having averted a potential major crisis in
a region running high with tensions," the source added.
U.S.-IRAN
RELATIONS
Iranian
officials said Wednesday they were strongly opposed to the United
States joining Syrian peace talks in Kazakhstan next week, local
media reported. "We are hostile to their presence and we have
not invited them," Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said
late Tuesday, according to the Tasnim news agency. That goes against
the position of the other two organisers of the talks -- Russia and
Turkey -- which have said the new US administration of Donald Trump
should be represented in Astana on Monday. Ali Shamkhani, secretary
of Iran's Supreme National Security Council which oversees
international coordination on the Syrian war, confirmed on Wednesday
that Iran had refused to invite the US. "There is no reason for
the United States to participate in the organising of political
initiatives in the Syrian crisis and it is out of the question that
they should have a role in the Astana negotiations," he said,
according to the official IRNA news agency.
Iranian
President Hassan Rouhani, speaking separately on Tuesday at a news
conference broadcast live on state television, said: "Iran,
Russia and Turkey managed to bring a ceasefire to Syria ... It shows
these three powers have influence. "The (Syrian) armed groups
have accepted the invitation of these three countries and are going
to Astana." Asked why the United States and Saudi Arabia had no
direct role in the talks, Rouhani said: "Some countries are not
attending the talks, and their role was destructive. They were helping
the terrorists."
Nizar Zakka, a
Lebanese-born U.S. permanent resident on hunger strike in Tehran's
Evin Prison since December 8, 2016, has been moved to a ward for
common criminals to force him to stop, his American lawyer told the
Campaign for Human Rights in Iran. Jason Poblete added that his
client meanwhile continues to be denied medical and consular
services. "We have a source in the facility who told us that he
was being punished for being on hunger strike," said Jason
Poblete in an interview on January 11, 2017. "He was moved to a
room with 60 other men and forced to sleep on the floor side by side
with common criminals." Zakka, who was sentenced to 10 years in
prison in September 2016, is seeking his immediate release, and
access to consular and medical services, which he has been denied
since being detained. Poblete also told the Campaign that Zakka was
told that he would be allowed to speak to his family if he stopped
the strike: "They are trying to get him to eat as a condition
for getting the things he wants. So, obviously the hunger strike is
having an effect."
SANCTIONS
ENFORCEMENT
Toronto-Dominion
Bank (TD Bank), a financial institution headquartered in Toronto,
Canada agreed to pay $516,105 to settle its potential civil liability
for violations of the US sanctions on Iran and Cuba. TD Bank
processed 39 transactions totaling $515,071 between Dec. 1, 2008 and
March 28, 2012, to or through the United States in apparent violation
of the Iranian transactions and sanctions regulations, the US Treasury
Department said.
SANCTIONS
RELIEF
Outotec has
agreed with National Iranian Copper Industries Company (NICICO) on
the delivery of two sulfuric acid plants for the Sarcheshmeh and
Khatoon Abad copper smelters in the Kerman province in Iran. The
value of the orders, approximately EUR 50 million, has been covered
by a confirmed Letter of Credit and booked in Outotec's Q4/2016 order
intake. Outotec's scope of delivery includes engineering, main
process equipment and instrumentation for the acid plants as well as
spare parts and supervisory services for installation and
commissioning. Outotec's deliveries will take place in mid-2018.
A 12-member
business delegation from Germany is planning to visit Iran February
5-8 to seek cooperation opportunities, Dawood Nazirizadeh, management
consultant and organizer of the business trip told Trend January 13.
"We will be in Tehran February 5-6 and in Tabriz February 6-8.
The companies are from different business fields, mostly chemistry,
electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and consulting,"
he said. According to Nazirizadeh, a German deputy minister of
economy will accompany the delegation. "There will be meetings
with Iran and Tabriz chambers of commerce and with different
ministries in the areas of renewable energy and innovation."
"Most of the companies want to have a first impression on Iran's
business. Some of them want to open a branch or hire some staff in
Iran," Nazirizadeh further said.
HUMAN
RIGHTS
An Iranian
bodybuilder has been arrested for publishing revealing photos of
herself on social media, the judiciary's news agency reported on
Wednesday. "One of the female bodybuilders who recently
published nude photographs on social networks has been
arrested," the agency said. In Iran, "nude" can refer
to any woman who is not wearing a headscarf or revealing parts of her
body such as arms and legs that must be covered in public. The
unnamed bodybuilder has been sent to prison because she was unable to
post bail of two million rials ($50,000, 47,000 euros), the
Mizanonline news agency said. She is thought to be one of two women
reported in September to have taken part in an international
competition.
Iran's
Revolutionary Guards are blocking the granted furlough (temporary
release) request of Saeed Malekpour, an Iranian-born Canadian
resident who has been in imprisoned in Tehran since 2008, his sister
told the Campaign for Human Rights in Iran. Maryam Malekpour, who
lives in Canada, also criticized the Canadian government for failing
to bring her brother back home. "Initially, we, including Saeed
and his lawyer, requested furlough but the prosecutor would not
agree," she said. "Now, both the prosecutor and the prison
warden have agreed, but the Revolutionary Guards is opposed."
"Saeed's lawyers wanted to request a review of his case, but he
had heard that the Revolutionary Guards could restore his death
sentence, so we decided not to do it," she added. "The
Revolutionary Guards are not happy that he was not executed."
... "The change of government in Iran (in 2013) and the coming
to power of [President Hassan] Rouhani has not made a difference to
Saeed's situation either," continued Maryam Malekpour. "We
are living a nightmare that seems to have no end. My own personal
life has been destroyed. My brother got cancer. My mother is not
acting normal. None of us are normal any more and we will never be
normal. It wasn't just Saeed whose life has been burned to the
ground."
DOMESTIC
POLITICS
Iran's
parliament passed a five-year economic development plan on Sunday
that includes a sharp rise in foreign investment, though Tehran may
not achieve that while U.S. president-elect Donald Trump is in
office. The plan lets the government arrange up to an average of $30
billion of foreign financing each year, in addition to $15 billion of
annual direct foreign investment in Iran, and up to $20 billion of
foreign investment conducted with local partners. Such volumes of
foreign investment would mark a big increase from levels seen in the
past few decades. Since 2000, net inflows of foreign direct
investment rarely exceeded $4 billion, according to the World Bank -
a small amount by the standards of major emerging markets. Investment
has been deterred by red tape and restrictive regulation, and more
recently by international sanctions.
OPINION
& ANALYSIS
With the death
of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Iran's former president and its preeminent
fixer, the Islamic Republic has begun the most consequential
leadership transition in its four-decade history. Rafsanjani's
departure from the scene will change little in the near-term struggle
for primacy among the theocracy's squabbling elites, but it is a
harbinger of a larger process of generational transition that will
determine whether the revolutionary state can sustain itself amidst a
myriad of domestic and regional challenges. The echoes of opposition
slogans chanted in his funeral march on Tuesday underscore the
frustration and uncertainty that is Rafsanjani's ultimate legacy: his
shrewd, ruthless pragmatism enabled the Islamic Republic to weather
intense crises, but could not overcome the fundamental impasse
between the state's ideological imperatives and the expectations of
its citizenry and the world... He never wavered in his support for
the Islamic Republic, pioneering the use of election rigging as a
means of sidelining rivals and overseeing vicious campaigns at home
and abroad intended to eliminate its adversaries and extend its
influence. He was equally indifferent to Iran's representative
institutions and its citizens' basic rights as to the excesses of the
regime's ideology. And while he consistently sought to improve Iran's
image and relationships abroad, he never proved willing or capable of
reining in the regime's reliance on terror and destabilization as a
lever of regional influence-which constrained the horizons of Iran's
rehabilitation.
In the latest
incident of Iranian bullying at sea, four Iranian boats again closed
in at high speed to a Navy destroyer in the Straits of Hormuz on
Sunday. Once again the U.S. Navy destroyer, USS Mahan, fired warning
shots after the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps boats did not
respond to requests to slow down. A U.S. Navy official said the
warning shots fired on Sunday were just one of seven interactions the
Mahan had with Iranian vessels over the weekend. Referring to other
similar encounters, the official said there had been "a total of
35 in 2016 that were assessed to be unsafe and unprofessional".
The incident is the latest in a string of tense encounters between
the two countries the last two years that has included Iranian rocket
launches, drones flying over U.S. vessels and the capture of US
sailors.
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