February 26, 2021
The Biden Administration has gone to court to seize 2 million barrels of oil it says was shipped from Iran, as the new administration in Washington shows no change from the Trump Administration in terms of enforcing sanctions.
The Department of Justice filed a case in a US district court, seeking to seize the cargo on the Greek-owned Achilleas tanker, according to a February 2 statement. The US alleges that the Pasdaran covertly shipped the oil abroad.
They “attempted to disguise the origin of the oil using ship-to-ship transfers, falsified documents, and other means, and provided a fraudulent bill of lading to deceive the owners of the Achilleas,” the department said. The ship and cargo were destined for China. That Iran reportedly went to great effort to disguise the origin of the oil suggests that China has a limit on how much Iranian oil it will buy.
The Achilleas’ owner, Capital Ship Management Corp., alerted US authorities to the possibility it had unknowingly taken on Iranian crude, after initially thinking it came from Iraq, Bloomberg reported in January.
Washington ordered the Liberia-flagged ship to sail to the US before Biden came to office on January 20, according to people familiar with the matter. The Biden Administration took the issue to court after the tanker arrived in the US.
The US will need to prove its allegations about the Achilleas’s oil in court proceedings. If it wins the case, it will send proceeds from the oil to a US government fund for victims of terrorism. The United States has been using a chemical analysis system it devised in the 1970s to identify the origin of oil cargoes.
Tehran shouted that the seizure of the crude was “an act of piracy,” ignoring the fact that the owner of the tanker cooperated fully with the United States.
This is the second crude cargo the United States has seized. And the previous cargo was also seized after the owner of the ship carrying it said it suspected the crude was Iranian. A US court has now upheld the US assertion that that cargo was Iranian and the cargo has been sold.
It isn’t clear who is the owner of either cargo and thus who the financial loser is. The cargo seized last year was destined for Venezuela.
Meanwhile, Indonesia has announced that it has seized the Iranian-flagged tanker MT Horse and the Panamanian-flagged MT Frea when it found the ships illegally shifting the Iranian ship’s crude cargo in Indonesian waters January 23.
The Indonesian Coast Guard said the ships violated international rules by not showing their national flags, turning off their automatic identification systems, covering the names on their hulls, anchoring illegally, illegally transferring fuel and failing to respond to a radio call. In addition, it said there was an oil spill around the Frea.
The crewmen 36 Iranian and 25 Chinese seamen were detained.
The Islamic Republic said the Horse, owned by the National Iranian Tanker Co. was seized over a “technical issue.”
