U.S. Files Lawsuit for the Forfeiture of $47 Million in Iranian Oil Proceeds

The United States’ Department of Justice has filed a civil lawsuit at a district court in D.C. for the forfeiture of $47 million in proceeds from the sale of some 1 million barrels of Iranian oil that went to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Qods Force.

The U.S. seized the oil last year and sold it, making $47 million from that sale.

Both the IRGC and the Quds Force were designated terrorist groups by the United States. Per the lawsuit, the oil was sold under a sanction evasion scheme between 2022 and 2024, with the DoJ detailing the scheme as using various tactics to avoid sanction action, using the U.S. financial system in the process.

“The facilitators used deceptive practices to masquerade the Iranian oil as Malaysian, including by manipulating the tanker’s automatic identification system to conceal that it onboarded the oil from a port in Iran,” the DoJ wrote in its report on the forfeiture news.

“The facilitators presented falsified documents to the Croatian storage facility and port authority, claiming that the oil was Malaysian. The facilitators paid for storage fees associated with the oil’s storage at the Croatian facility in U.S. dollars, transactions that were conducted through U.S. financial institutions that would have refused the transactions had they known they were associated with Iranian oil.”

The 2024 sale of that one million barrels of Iranian crude was not the first by the U.S. after seizing Iranian oil cargo. Back in 2020, the U.S. sold the cargo of four oil tankers, making over $40 million from it. The tankers carrying the oil were en route to Venezuela when the U.S. authorities seized them. Washington has claimed it had the right to seize the cargo and assume ownership because the money that Iran earned from oil exports went to fund the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which the U.S. has designated as a terrorist organization.

By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com

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