Iran negotiating with UK over NITC sanction
Iran says it is going to negotiate with the UK to remove its biggest tanker firm – the National Iranian Tanker Company (NITC) - from the list of sanctioned Iranian entities.
An informed source from the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) said on Saturday that NITC has sent a legal team to London to discuss a recent move by the UK’s Treasury to re-impose sanctions on the company.
The source – that has not been named – said that the Iranian legal team will try to remove NITC from the list of sanctioned entities before London takes any punitive measure against the company.
The UK Treasury’s move against NITC, the source said, is politically motivated and is against the nature of current diplomatic talks over the fate of sanctions and Iran’s nuclear energy program.
The source further added that no change is expected to happen with regards to the status of sanctions against NITC given that the company will still be under the general sanctions by the European Union.
“Nevertheless, taking the company out of UK’s blacklist is important for Iran from the political point of view,” Iran’s Fars news agency quoted the unnamed source as saying.
The UK Treasury in an update on the status of anti-Iran sanctions on February 16 announced that it had return NITC to the list of sanctioned Iranian entities. It also said it had returned Iranian businessman Gholam Hossein Golparvar to the list of sanctioned Iranian individuals.
This followed similar measures by the European Union on February 12.
The EU General Court – the bloc’s second-highest court - ruled in July 2014 that there were no grounds to blacklist the NITC after it contested the designation.
The Court had also annulled sanctions against Golparvar and some other Iranian businessmen in December 2013, saying the listings were legally faulty.
Iran has already criticized the decisions by the UK and the EU to put NITC back in the list of sanctions. Mohammad-Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, on Friday described the sanctions against the company as “illogical”.
NITC is a subsidiary of NIOC and transports Iranian crude to export markets. The company has a transport capacity of 11 million tons a year and is considered as the biggest tanker company in the Middle East and 4th in the world.
AA/AA
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