July 22, 2016
Switzerland’s ambassador to Iran told the country last week that one reason foreign firms are slow to invest in Iran is the country’s failure to protect intellectual property rights like patents and copyrights.
Ambassador Giulio Hass added an entirely new reason to the list of impediments discouraging foreign firms from investing in Iran.
The ambassador said one of the barriers to investment in Iran, especially for the pharmaceutical industry, which is huge in Switzerland, is the refusal of Iran to adopt the Intellectual Property Rights Convention.
“To facilitate investment, Iran should remove impediments on the way of intellectual property rights,” Hass said.
“For instance, pharmaceutical companies in the past undertook to make several hundred-million-dollar investments in Iran, but, due to the absence of Iranian accession to the convention, they backtracked,” he said.
Iran blames the failure of foreign firms to invest in Iran entirely on the United States and its refusal to allow Iran to have access to the US banking system. Some Iranian officials—like Ali-Akbar Velayati last week—even assert that the United States has not yet lifted all the sanctions it is required to lift under the nuclear deal. But all the sanctions, which were listed page-after-page in the agreement, were lifted in one fell swoop in January.
Iran requires foreign investors in Iran to share technology with the Iranian firms with which they partner. What Ambassador Hass is saying is that European investors fear Iranian firms won’t protect the shared technology but sell it to competitors of the European firms. The European firms have no protection from that under Iranian law.
Meeting with a group of provincial officials and economists last week, Hass also specifically denied that the United States is trying to squeeze Iran economically.
Switzerland handles US relations with Iran and Hass is effectively the US ambassador to Iran. Some previous Swiss ambassadors have even said they spend more time on American issues than Swiss issues.
Hass said, “As the ambassador of Switzerland handling the US Interests Section in Iran, I go to the US several times a year. I have gotten to know that the US administration is willing to open the economic space in Iran,” he said.
