Ali Rastegar, Bank Mellat’s CEO, said on Monday that the UK High Court has ruled in favor of his bank and it will receive $4 billion in compensation by late spring.
Mellat had made a case against the UK Treasury for being sanctioned without sufficient evidence because of its involvement in the country's nuclear program. According to Rastegar, the favorable ruling is in its final stages, ILNA reported.
Bank Mellat, Iran’s largest privately-owned bank, was hit with sanctions in 2010 as the EU and western countries targeted Iran’s nuclear program. The European Court of Justice has also ruled that the bank's assets should not have been frozen in 2010.
Bank Mellat had sued the UK government for losses after it succeeded in 2014 in challenging a 2009 treasury order prohibiting that country's financial institutions from doing business with the Iranian lender — in effect shutting it out of the UK financial sector — because of its alleged links to Tehran’s nuclear program. In October a high court in the UK rejected the British government's attempts to dismiss Mellat's $4 billion damage claim against the UK Treasury for imposing "irrational" sanctions on the private lender.
Rastegar also said Shell oil company has paid $860 million of its debts to Bank Mellat. The major Iranian lender has plans to open an account for the National Iranian Oil Company in an unnamed European bank to facilitate the transfer of Royal Dutch Shell's $1.3 billion outstanding debt to the state-owned NIOC.
