The United States State Department acknowledged on Thursday that it delayed releasing a US$400 million cash payment to Iran in January until it was assured that a plane carrying three released American prisoners had left Tehran.
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The newspaper reported that United States officials allegedly would not let a plane containing the cash in Geneva leave for Iran until a Swiss Air Force plane with the three of the United States citizens on board left Tehran.
President Obama makes a statement from the White House regarding the release of Americans by Iran on January 17.
The pastor further said that he is happy to be free, but has grave concerns over the human rights abuses that continue being committed against Iranian prisoners, among whom are other Christians.
Administration officials initially denied that the $400 million cash transfer was tantamount to critics’ assertion of a ransom payment, insisting that the funds were part of a $1.7 billion financial settlement that the USA had reached with Iran as part of the nuclear deal. President Barack Obama’s administration has previously stated emphatically that the payment, which was made to settle a decades-old arms deal, did not amount to ransom.
“He denied it was for the hostages, but it was”, Trump said in a speech in Charlotte, North Carolina. “We didn’t here, and we won’t in the future”, the president said at an August 4 press conference. “The president owes the American people a full accounting of his actions and the unsafe precedent he has set”, Speaker of the US House of Representatives Paul Ryan claimed.
The money comes from an account used by the Iranian government to buy American military equipment in the days of the USA -backed shah. “Not only were the two negotiations separate, they were conducted by different teams on each side, including, in the case of The Hague claims, by technical experts involved in these negotiations for many years”.
The United States and Iran today have settled a long outstanding claim at the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal in the Hague.
“It would have been foolish, imprudent and irresponsible for us not to try and maintain maximum leverage”, he said, according to ABC News.
Earlier this year, when White House announced that Americans had been freed from Iran, it also said that a separate, decades-old financial dispute over the sale of US weapons to Iran had been settled, resulting in a $1.7 billion payment. They weren’t authorized to speak publicly on the matter and demanded anonymity. US officials had pinned the delays on difficulties finding Rezaian’s wife and mother.
A ruling on the military fund was expected soon, the official said, as Iran asked past year for the tribunal to hear its case and Tehran and Washington had been negotiating proposals for a hearing.
Iran will receive the balance of $400 million in the Trust Fund, as well as a roughly $1.3 billion compromise on the interest. -Iranian negotiations. Psaki said, “There are times where diplomacy needs privacy”. “The idea that this was all orchestrated as part of some kind of quid pro quo is just not accurate”. Washington released seven Iranians, mostly dual Iranian-American nationals convicted of sanctions violations, as part of the deal.
Obama said that the timing of the delivery was “dictated by the fact that as a effect of us negotiating around the nuclear deal, we had diplomatic negotiations with Iran for the first time in several decades” and that nonpayment could have cost the United States billions of dollars. Abedini said he was told by a senior Iranian intelligence official that their departure was contingent on the movement of a second plane.
The ordeal has set off a tidal wave of condemnation from Republicans, who have questioned the timing of the two events and said the government paid ransom for the prisoner release.
The timing has raised suspicions, especially among Republicans, that the USA paid a “ransom” of sorts to the Iranians.
Former diplomats and scholars of Iran say that the transaction is as much about perception as provable reality.
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All of the approximately 4,700 private US claims filed against the Government of Iran at the Tribunal were resolved during the first 20 years of the Tribunal, resulting in payments of more than $2.5 billion in awards to USA nationals and companies through that process.
