House Republicans are doubling down against the White House in a campaign to prevent Iran from doing business in USA dollars, the latest political spat between them and the Obama administration over implementation of the Iran nuclear deal. The administration has ruled out giving Iran access to the USA financial system or direct access to dollars, but American officials have been considering other ways to Iran reap the full benefits of the deal in which it agreed to curb its nuclear program in exchange for billions in sanctions relief.
Advertisement
FILE – House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Rep. Ed Royce, R-Calif. speaks on Capitol Hill in Washington, Jan. 7, 2016.
“The United States will not be Iran’s customer forever”, the DOE spokeswoman said.
Under the nuclear deal, Iran is converting the Arak facility, with China’s help, into a modified reactor that is seen as posing a much reduced nuclear-proliferation threat.
“On the heavy water, we are among the very few developing countries which is able to produce its own heavy water and now we have entered the global market”, the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, Ali Akbar Salehi, told Iranian state media this month. Trudeau said the United States was under no obligation to purchase heavy water from Iran, nor it is obligated to do so in the future, but the JCPOA required Iran to reduce its heavy water inventory below the 130 metric tonne limit.
The sale will be signed off on Friday in Vienna, the State Department said, by officials from the six countries that negotiated the nuclear deal.
Zarif complained this week that the administration has not been “proactive” in explaining what businesses can and cannot do under the nuclear deal, and as a result Iran remains locked out of the global financial system.
The financial obstacles are bad news for Iran’s moderate president, Hassan Rouhani, who ran for office on promises of an economic revival fuelled by the nuclear deal and the lifting of sanctions. The Department of Energy, however, defended the decision in a statement.
The areas needing clarification, he said, include access to funds and financing for foreign firms to do business with Iran along with Iran’s access to its own money, which had been frozen overseas under the nuclear sanctions. The Oak Ridge lab houses the Department of Energy’s Isotope Business Office, and it will sell quantities of heavy water to qualified buyers.
But Ryan says Kerry didn’t definitively say no when he had the opportunity to do so earlier this week.
Advertisement
The administration has deployed various officials to muzzle the GOP criticism, trotting out acting Treasury Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Crimes Adam Szubin for a speech at the Center for a New American Security last week to lay out the objectives and limitations of US sanctions.
