The U.S. Department of Justice has filed a civil lawsuit in Washington, D.C., to seize $47 million in proceeds from the sale of 1 million barrels of Iranian oil. The oil was linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the Qods Force, both of which the U.S. has designated as terrorist organizations.
The U.S. seized the oil last year and sold it, generating $47 million in the process. According to the lawsuit, the oil was sold through a scheme designed to evade sanctions between 2022 and 2024. The Department of Justice (DoJ) outlined how the scheme involved deceptive practices, including falsely labeling the oil as Malaysian and using the U.S. financial system to facilitate transactions.
“The facilitators used misleading tactics to disguise the Iranian oil as Malaysian,” the DoJ reported. “They manipulated the tanker’s identification system to hide that the oil came from an Iranian port.” The facilitators also submitted false documents to a Croatian storage facility, falsely claiming the oil was Malaysian. They paid storage fees in U.S. dollars, using U.S. financial institutions that would have rejected the transactions if they knew the oil was Iranian.
This wasn’t the first time the U.S. had seized Iranian oil. In 2020, the U.S. seized four oil tankers bound for Venezuela and sold their cargo, earning over $40 million. The U.S. maintains that it has the right to seize Iranian oil shipments because the proceeds from those sales support the IRGC, a group the U.S. has designated as a terrorist organization.
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