The decision to include the European-Iranian Trade Bank (EIH) of Hamburg on the EU’s blacklist “for its role in illegal activities” is expected to be on the agenda of the EU foreign ministers’ meeting May 23.
“Evidence pointing to the EIH’s involvement in [nuclear] proliferation has multiplied and become tangible,” the official said, adding that, “from the German government’s point of view, conditions have been met” for a ban “and this is also the consensus at the European level.”
Citing unnamed Western officials, The Wall Street Journal last year said the EIH bank had done more than a billion dollars of business on behalf of firms subject to US, UN and EU sanctions.
The German government did not accept the evidence of ties until recent weeks after France and the United States laid out the documentation they had collected against the bank.
France and the United States leaned hard on the Germans this year after India started to use the bank as a route for paying Iran more than a billion dollars a month for the purchase of Iranian crude oil.
German officials at first said the evidence didn’t warrant blacklisting the bank, and that a blacklisting could be challenged successfully in the German courts. Germany changed it mind after seeing the US and French documentation.
The Journal said that EIH’s business partners include units of Iran’s Defense Industries Organization, the Aerospace Industries Organization and the Pasdaran.
It said that in 2009 EIH appeared to have been involved in a broad sanctions-evasion scheme, conducting transactions on behalf of Iran’s Bank Sepah, which had been sanctioned for facilitating Iran’s weapons trade and proliferation activities.
EIH was founded by Iranian merchants in Hamburg in 1971. It operates openly under the supervision of German bank regulators. The US Treasury blacklisted it previously for alleged illicit business with Iran.
