—although only to countries that have already cut off purchases of Iranian oil.
The announcements of oil cutoffs are portrayed inside Iran as a display of Iranian power and the ability of the Islamic Republic to push other states around but not be pushed around by other states.
However, silly announcements also have the effect of making the regime look silly to other governments.
The latest case involved Spain. PressTV, the regime’s English language news outlet, carried a story saying Iran had halted all oil sales to Spain. When the Foreign Ministry in Madrid saw that, it explained that Spain had stopped all Iranian oil imports at the end of February.
On that same theme, Oil Minister Rostam Qasemi announced Tuesday that he had ordered a halt to oil sales to Greece. But Greek news reports last Thursday said that country’s two importers of Iranian oil had halted purchases earlier than originally planned because it had gotten too difficult to make payments to Iran owing to banking restrictions.
The Greeks have been buying much of their oil from Iran because it has provided good credit terms and Greece needs good credit terms considering its financial standing in the world.
A source at Hellenic Petroleum, the country’s largest refiner, told Reuters, “We were using a Turkish bank but we have to use an EU corresponding bank to make the payment from our Greek bank to the Turkish one and the EU banks are refusing that.”
The source said Hellenic had hoped that the US exemption from sanctions, granted last month, would change that, but he said the banks wouldn’t change their policies because they didn’t know what the US exemption meant and “for them it is safer to do nothing.”
The other Greek importer, Motor Oil, told Reuters it had halted Iranian oil purchases earlier in the year. “This has been a closed issue for quite some time now,” Motor Oil Chief Financial Officer Petros Tzannetakis said. Earlier, Iran said it had halted sales to French and British companies, although French companies had already stopped buying. Anglo-Dutch Shell was, however, still buying—and news reports said it was still buying Iranian crude weeks after Iran said it had cut off sales to the firm.
Regime news outlets have been portraying sanctions as more harmful to the West than to Iran. For example, the state-owned PressTV last week reported: “US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has warned against the adverse consequences of tensions with Iran and high oil prices, saying they pose ‘the biggest threats’ to the US economy.”
But Geithner said no such thing. His actual statement in an interview with Fox News was: “You have, obviously, the fear of Iran and oil prices. Even though that is not hurting the economy today, people can still feel that in their pocketbook today.”