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Bloomberg: "Iran is set to sign major oil
and gas deals with foreign companies in the second half of next year, its
first such contracts since international sanctions were lifted in
January, according to Wood Mackenzie Ltd. The first oil under the
agreements will flow in 2020, Homayoun Falakshahi, a research analyst at
the consulting firm, said Tuesday in an interview in London. Iran has
worked on the terms of the Iran Petroleum Contract -- known as the IPC --
for the past three years and should finalize them by the end of 2016, he
said... 'It comes down to how good the new contracts are,' he said. 'It's
more likely they will still remain very tough; we are probably going to
see a few deals but I don't think we are going to see a huge inflow of
companies.' While the new IPC won't be as onerous as the previous fiscal
terms, known as buybacks, they may still be among the harshest in the
world, according to the analyst." http://t.uani.com/2bFN4xm
Reuters: "Iran's Vice-President Eshaq
Jahangiri has told the oil and finance ministries to start using the
approved new draft for the Iran Petroleum Contract (IPC) for oil and gas
deals, the Oil Ministry's news agency Shana reported on Monday. The
launch of the IPC has been postponed several times as hardline rivals of
President Hassan Rouhani resisted any deal that could end the so-called
buy-back system under which foreign firms were banned from owning stakes
in Iranian companies. Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh attended a
parliamentary session on Sunday to answer criticisms of the IPC. He said
last week the IPC would need minor amendments but that implementation of
its final draft would not need the approval of parliament. Shana
published the general terms and conditions of the IPC, specifying that
the new contracts are divided into three main categories: exploration,
development of discovered fields that would lead to production, and
enhanced oil recovery (EOR) to increase output... Only Iranian
exploration and production companies whose credibility has been approved
by the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) can partner with foreign oil
companies." http://t.uani.com/2bi8OuV
Asharq
Al-Awsat: "Iran
runs six military camps near the city of Kirkuk in northern Iraq,
including around 1,500 officers and commanders from the Quds Force of the
Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Tehran is also planning to open new military
camps between the cities of Kirkuk and Mosul reaching to the Syrian
border, informed sources told Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper. Head of the
military wing at the Kurdistan Freedom Party Hussein Yazdan said:
'Mohammad Shahlaei, a veteran commander of the Quds Force, currently supervises
the operations and movements of this Revolutionary Guards unit in
northern Iraq.'" http://t.uani.com/2bgormM
Congressional
Action
Free
Beacon: "The
Obama administration is withholding from Congress details about how $1.3
billion in U.S. taxpayer funds was delivered to Iran, according to
conversations with lawmakers, who told the Washington Free Beacon that
the administration is now stonewalling an official inquiry into the
matter. The Departments of State, Treasury, and Justice have all rebuffed
a congressional probe into the circumstances surrounding the $1.3 billion
payment to Iran, which is part of an additional $400 million cash payout
that occurred just prior to the release of several U.S. hostages and led
to accusations that the administration had paid Iran a ransom. The Obama
administration has admitted in recent days that the $400 million cash
delivery to Iran was part of an effort to secure the release of these
American hostages, raising further questions on Capitol Hill about White
House efforts to suppress these details from the public. The $400 million
was part of a $1.7 billion legal settlement reached with Iran earlier
this year. Congressional inquiries into how this money reached Iran are
failing to get answers. The State and Treasury Departments declined on
Tuesday to answer a series of questions from the Free Beacon about the
method in which U.S. taxpayer funds were paid to Iran. The administration
is also withholding key details about the payment from leading members of
Congress, including Sens. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) and Mike Lee (R., Utah),
who launched an inquiry into the matter earlier this month. The
Departments of State, Treasury, and Justice all failed to respond to the
inquiry by Monday's deadline, according to congressional sources tracking
the matter." http://t.uani.com/2bi1zTt
Business
Risk
ABC
(Australia):
"Australia could be losing billions of dollars a year in trade with
Iran thanks to ties that at least one domestic bank has to the United
States. An Australian businessman has told the ABC he would like to trade
with Iran, but his financial institution said it wanted no part in his
trade, fearing a backlash from the US. Australia has dropped trade
sanctions with Iran, but in the United States they remain in place.
Sydney-based exporter and importer Christopher Cox told PM he took his
business to the ANZ bank because of its far-reaching international branch
network, compared with other local banks. But ANZ said it would not
provide the channel needed to send and receive between Australia and
Iran, leaving Mr Cox extremely frustrated, as all the other necessary
financial and business infrastructures to do business abroad are in
place... In a statement provided to the ABC in regards to the matter, ANZ
said: 'While there has been a lifting of some sanctions to Iran by
Australian authorities, as an international bank we continue to comply
with the US Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control
(OFAC) which bans transactions to and from Iran.'" http://t.uani.com/2bvXn6t
Sanctions
Relief
AFP: "Iranian firms want to
participate in the construction of a massive canal across Nicaragua that
a Chinese company has vowed to build, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed
Javad Zarif said Wednesday. Representatives of private Iranian
construction companies accompanying Zarif on a visit to Nicaragua's
capital discussed the possibility of getting a slice of the $50 billion
project, the minister told a news conference. The ambitious plan calls for
a waterway linking the Pacific and Atlantic oceans that would rival the
century-old one in Panama, which has recently been expanded to take
bigger ships... Zarif made Nicaragua the second stop of a Latin American
tour that began Monday in Cuba and which was to include Ecuador,
Venezuela, Bolivia and Chile." http://t.uani.com/2bgf89q
TASS
(Russia): "The
Russian Helicopters holding (subsidiary of Rostec State Corporation) is
in negotiations with the Iranian colleagues on the supply of the light
helicopters Ansat and Kamov Ka-226T for Iran's Health Ministry, Deputy
Director General of the holding Alexander Shcherbinin said on Tuesday.
'Russian Helicopters conducts negotiations on the supply of the Ansat and
Ka-226T light helicopters for the Iranian Ministry of Health and Medical
Education. In addition to the delivery of the helicopters, the issue of
organizing their assembly in Iran is being considered. According to our
estimates, Iran needs about 60 Russian light helicopters,' Shcherbinin
said. The holding's press service said that from August 23 to 25 Russian
Helicopters will for the first time hold a seminar for the Iranian
operators and potential customers of Russian helicopters." http://t.uani.com/2bi4NX2
Foreign
Affairs
WSJ: "Iran has told members of the
Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries that it would attend
talks next month on oil production, delegates to the cartel said, adding
to hopes for an agreement to curb output. Iran circulated a letter to
OPEC members, saying it would attend informal talks in Algeria late next
month among the group's members, according to an OPEC delegate who saw
the one-sentence missive. Other delegates said they were told of Iran's
attendance by high-level OPEC officials... OPEC, a 14-nation producer
group that controls over a third of the world's crude-oil production, isn't
scheduled to meet formally until November in Vienna. But members have
said they would hold talks at the International Energy Forum in Algiers,
scheduled for Sept. 26-28... OPEC's new secretary-general, Mohammad
Sanusi Barkindo, will travel to Tehran and Qatar next month ahead of the
Algiers summit to discuss freezing production, OPEC delegates said on
Tuesday. It would be Mr. Barkindo's first official trip since he took the
helm at OPEC this month." http://t.uani.com/2bi3Uhv
Iraq
Crisis
Reuters: "Shi'ite militias in Iraq
detained, tortured and abused far more Sunni civilians during the
American-backed capture of the town of Falluja in June than U.S. officials
have publicly acknowledged, Reuters has found. More than 700 Sunni men
and boys are still missing more than two months after the Islamic State
stronghold fell. The abuses occurred despite U.S. efforts to restrict the
militias' role in the operation, including threatening to withdraw
American air support, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials." http://t.uani.com/2bzL7z2
Al-Monitor: "Iraq's popular militias have
no plans to merge with the army, Jean Aziz reports from Beirut, where a
meeting was held among Western diplomats and representatives,
nongovernmental organizations and officials from Iraq's Popular
Mobilization Units (PMU). 'We will be a military force that is part of
the Iraqi state, but not part of the Iraqi army. This is due to many
reasons that we explained to them, namely the corruption spread within
the Iraqi government institutions, and I think they understood our point
of view. We made it clear that we will be an alternative army
subordinated to the state, just like Iran's [Islamic] Revolutionary Guard
Corps,' an Iraqi militia leader told Aziz." http://t.uani.com/2bOVelr
Domestic
Politics
Gulf
News: "'Thirty
per cent of Iran's population are suffering from poverty and hunger ...'.
This is not a statement issued by the Iranian opposition group known as
the Mujahideen Khalq Organisation (MKO), nor by other Iranian
organisations abroad. Or for that matter by any Arab body. It is an
official statement issued last week by Ali Akbar Saari, attached to
Iranian health ministry. The statement has angered ordinary Iranians, who
see tens of billions of dollars worth of oil revenues getting wasted in
financing terrorist organisations or in wars that Iran has nothing to do
with. How can one imagine such a high percentage of poor in a country
rich in natural resources, particularly in oil and gas." http://t.uani.com/2bzMD45
Opinion
& Analysis
Peter
Berkowitz in RealClearPolitics: "But there are broader questions about the Obama
administration's Iran dealings than dissembling about the mechanics of
hostage negotiations. They form a substantial part of Jay Solomon's
painstakingly reported book, 'The Iran Wars: Spy Games, Bank Battles, and
the Secret Deals That Reshaped the Middle East.' It shows that the Obama
administration's far-fetched denials of ransom payment are part and
parcel of more fundamental problems. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of
Action -- the July 2015 Vienna agreement between Iran, on one side, and,
on the other, the United States, the other four permanent members of the
U.N. Security Council, Germany, and the European Union -- was for the
Obama administration, Solomon writes, 'the most important initiative of
its second term and the defining foreign policy legacy of Barack Obama's
presidency.' Solomon stresses, 'President Obama, from his first days in
office, pursued an opening to Iran and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei with
an obsessive commitment.' To win Ayatollah Khamenei's trust, Obama
withheld support for the spontaneous democratic uprising against the
corrupt June 2009 Iranian presidential election. The administration also
deceived the public by undertaking secret negotiations with Iran and
conducting outreach and talks 'behind the backs of the Security Council
and the United States' closest Middle East allies, including Israel and
Saudi Arabia.' During negotiations - both those conducted openly and
those done surreptitiously - Obama's diplomatic team, led by Secretary of
State John Kerry, made numerous, significant, unreciprocated concessions.
And to avoid antagonizing Khamenei, Obama decided that America should
stand by and do practically nothing as Syria's president and Iranian
client, Bashar al-Assad, slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people,
wounded more than a million others, and drove in excess of 12 million
Syrians from their homes. A Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent for
nearly two decades, Solomon is an old-school reporter who regards his
principal mission as getting the story right. On the basis of extensive
and courageous reporting from the Middle East and assiduous coverage of
the ebb and flow of power in Washington, he discloses the multiple
dimensions-political, diplomatic, economic, military, and clandestine-of
America's post-9/11 struggles with Iran. Although Obama was determined to
correct what he regarded as George W. Bush's mistakes in the Middle East,
the 44th president's policies resembled, in a crucial respect, the
43rd's: Both vied with, Solomon's book reveals, an adversary we didn't
understand. Obama thought he was replacing a foolish war with smart
diplomacy. But a central question Solomon's book explores is whether that
approach was effective. His scrupulous reporting will do much to corroborate
the judgment of those who believe that, for the sake of Obama's
supposedly crowning foreign policy achievement, the president paid much
too high a price... Solomon observes that 'at the heart of Obama's
philosophy was a sense that' his administration 'had righted history'
with the Iran deal. That's a messianic sense. From paying what bears an
uncanny resemblance to ransom, to disregarding state sponsorship of
terrorism and declining to confront epic state brutality, to triggering
nuclear proliferation in the name of nonproliferation, what will a
messianic sense not justify?" http://t.uani.com/2bgrMSV
Bret
Stephens in WSJ:
"In the fall of 1940 the governments of Japan, Italy and
Germany-bitter enemies in World War I-signed the Tripartite Pact,
pledging mutual support to 'establish and maintain a new order of things'
in Europe and Asia. Within five years, 70 million people would be killed
in the effort to build, and then destroy, that new order. The Pact was
the culminating act in a series of nonaggression, friendship and
neutrality treaties signed by the dictatorships of the day, sometimes to
deceive anxious democracies but more often to divvy up the anticipated
spoils of conquest. So it's worth noting our new era of cooperation
between dictatorships-and to think about where it could lead. The era
began in July 2015, when Iran's Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani paid
a visit to Moscow to propose a plan to save Bashar Assad's regime in
Syria from collapse. Iran and Russia are not natural allies, even if they
have a common client in Damascus. Iranians have bitter memories of the
Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, and the Kremlin has never
been fond of Islamists, even of the Shiite variety. But what tipped the
scales in favor of a joint operation was a shared desire to humiliate the
U.S. and kick it out of the Middle East. 'America's long-term scheme for
the region is detrimental to all nations and countries, particularly Iran
and Russia, and it should be thwarted through vigilance and closer
interaction,' Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei told Vladimir Putin during the
Russian's visit to Tehran last November. Since then, Tehran has agreed to
purchase $8 billion in top-shelf Russian weapons and is seeking Moscow's
help to build another 10 nuclear reactors-useful reminders of how the
mullahs are spending their sanctions-relief windfall. The two countries
have also conducted joint naval exercises in the Caspian Sea. Just last
week Russia used Iranian air bases (a little too publicly for Tehran's
taste) to conduct bombing raids on Syria. All this is happening as the
nuclear deal was supposed to be nudging Iran in a more pro-American
direction." http://t.uani.com/2bFPJXz
Emanuele
Ottolenghi in Forbes: "The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)
reached last year between Iran and six world powers lifted sanctions
against Iran's aviation sector, allowing aircraft manufacturers like
Boeing and Airbus to sell aircraft to Iran. But the fact that those
prohibitions have been lifted does not mean that the rationale behind
them has changed. Iran remains the foremost state sponsor of terrorism in
the world and is still number one on the recently-released Basel
Anti-Money Laundering Index Report of 2016, which assesses the risk of
money laundering and terrorist financing in 149 countries. Iranian
commercial aircraft routinely violate international aviation rules by
transporting arms and military personnel to Syria, and selling aircraft
to Iran will expose manufacturers to the risk of becoming complicit in
such activities. Tehran wants to buy up to 500 aircraft over the next
decade to rejuvenate its aging fleet, and Airbus seeks to sell 118 of its
own. Tehran has also struck a deal with the French-Italian ATR to buy 40
regional planes, and other deals are in the works with Canada's
Bombardier and Brazil's Embraer. Despite Congressional opposition to the
Boeing sale, the Iran Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) expects this
deal to go through. Given the Obama administration's support for the
deal, this optimism is understandable, but premature. Once manufacturers
take a hardnosed look at its terms, they will realize the risks far
outweigh the benefits. The problem with the Islamic Republic's aircraft
shopping spree is that Iran's state-owned airline, Iran Air, will be the
sole company purchasing these aircraft. Its current fleet stands at 36
aircraft; its subsidiary, Iran Air Tours, has 14. Because it does not
need so many planes, it is not likely to retain all of the aircraft it
purchases. Iran Air will more likely act as a front for all other Iranian
airlines, including, crucially, Mahan Air, which remains under U.S.
sanctions for its ongoing support for Iran's military involvement in
Syria." http://t.uani.com/2bOXusM
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