Negligence of the former government in buying eurodollar bonds has now resulted in the appropriation of Iran’s assets worth $2 billion by the Unite States, Valiollah Seif, governor of the Central Bank of Iran said on Saturday.
“Although CBI experts and senior officials had warned against investing in dollar denominated securities, the government of president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad went ahead and purchased it, thus paving the way for the damage done to our assets,” he lamented, the CBI website reported.
He elaborated by saying that the U-Turn dollar transactions with Iran had been authorized at the time as an exception to the US sanctions regime against Iran.
“Regretfully, in 2008 the law restricting dollar transactions with Iran was reenacted and American banks were banned from processing dollar transactions with Iran. And then in 2012 the US executive order for appropriating Iran’s assets in that country was issued.”
Seif criticized the previous government in its approach saying officials at the time did next to nothing to counter the US moves.
“Their negligent and indifference toward these measures by the US encouraged American officials to step up their actions which finally resulted in the 2012 confiscation of CBI assets.”
The senior official stressed that the ‘illegal and unfair’ action by the US in its entirety happened when the previous government was in office. “Back then such issues were taken rather lightly and considered unimportant by the government officials” in Tehran.
The Rouhani administration strongly condemned a US Supreme Court ruling issued earlier this week that supports the alleged victims of terrorism blamed on Iran who had turned to the courts for redress.
Larceny
In a meeting with senior private and public bankers, first vice president, Eshaq Jahangiri, censured the government in Washington for allowing appropriation of the $2 billion of Iran’s assets describing it as “larceny”.
“Iran’s government will use all the tools at its disposal to recover these assets,” he told a Cabinet meeting, ISNA reported.
He dismissed claims that the current government is to blame for the blocking and confiscation of Iran’s assets, saying the whole process was launched during the time of the previous government. “With a complete lack of discernment, they bought $2 billion dollars of US securities making it very easy for the US government to confiscate them.”
The Foreign Ministry’s director for political and security affairs, Hamid Baidinejad has said that investing Iran’s money in US securities was indeed “reckless’’ and not in line with the nation’s macro policies.
“At the same time when court proceedings were underway in the US against Iran, the previous government did not transfer the assets from the accounts in Europe despite the fact that tough banking and financial sanctions had been imposed in 2006.”
He pointed to the coordinated efforts started by the American plaintiffs in the Peterson vs. Bank Markazi case in 2008, recalling that even at that point the Ahmadinejad government did not transfer the assets.
