South Koreans in Cahoots With Trumpian Anti-Iran Policy

South Korean banks wary of US sanctions are holding tight to billions of dollars in Iranian money, apparently unwilling or unable to budge before Joe Biden assumes office as the next president of the United States on Wednesday.
The banks won’t release more than $7 billion of Iranian oil money stuck in won-denominated deposits in South Korea, not even to a special humanitarian trade channel partly overseen by the US, said the governor of the Central Bank of Iran, Abdolnaser Hemmati, who met a South Korean delegation in Tehran last week.
They’re showing “full cooperation” with the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign to isolate Iran from the global banking system through sanctions, Hemmati said Monday in response to questions sent by Bloomberg. He denied that the seizure of a South Korean-flagged tanker by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps last month was related to the dispute over the funds.