The U.S. Treasury Department said on Monday that it designated the Russian financial institution VTB Bank for its involvement in evading Iranian sanctions, including forming relationships with Iranian banks.
The department “will continue to target and disrupt those who provide material, technological or financial support that allows the Iranian regime to sustain its terrorist enterprise,” stated Scott Bessent, the U.S. treasury secretary. “Treasury will not tolerate any support to the regime and will continue to identify, expose and isolate Iran’s enablers.”
The department “has mapped the networks, facilitators and financial channels that Iran uses to smuggle oil, evade sanctions and fund terror,” it said. “Working with partners across the U.S. government, the European Union, United Kingdom, Gulf partners and others, Treasury is targeting any source of the regime’s illicit revenue.”
The department is targeting five channels, through which aid is being supplied to Iran: cryptocurrencies and digital financial exchanges, technology, gold (used to bypass currency controls), Iranian airlines and related transportation networks, and the “shadow fleet” of oil tankers and maritime transport facilitators used to ship Iranian material, the Trump administration said.
Russia’s VTB is now “among the most comprehensively sanctioned financial institutions in the world,” the department said.
The U.S. federal operation has “introduced greater secondary sanctions risk and an accelerated pace of enforcement for those who continue to do business with the Iranian regime,” the department said. “Foreign financial institutions that continued to deal with VTB following its designation under OFAC’s Iran sanctions authorities are exposed to even more sanctions risk than before and should cut off those relationships immediately.”
