March 27,2025
The United States’ Department of Justice has filed a civil lawsuit at the district court in Washington, DC, for the forfeiture of $47 million that was due to go to the Qods Force from the sale of some 1 million barrels of Iranian oil in Croatia.
The US seized the oil last year and sold it, making $47 million from that sale. It is now asking the court to bless that seizure.
The lawsuit says the oil was sold under a sanctions evasion scheme between 2022 and 2024, with the Justice Department detailing the scheme as using various tactics to avoid sanctions action. For example, it says the oil was transferred at sea from one tanker to a second and then to a third in an effort to hide the Iranian origin of the crude.
“The facilitators used deceptive practices to masquerade the Iranian oil as Malaysian, including by manipulating the tanker’s automatic identification system to conceal that it onboarded the oil from a port in Iran,” the Justice Department wrote in its report.
“The facilitators presented falsified documents to the Croatian storage facility and port authority, claiming that the oil was Malaysian. The facilitators paid for storage fees associated with the oil’s storage at the Croatian facility in US dollars, transactions that were conducted through US financial institutions that would have refused the transactions had they known they were associated with Iranian oil.”
The 2024 sale of that one million barrels of Iranian crude was not the first time the US has seized Iranian oil cargo. Back in 2020, the US sold the cargo of four oil tankers, making over $40 million from it. The tankers carrying the oil were en route to Venezuela when the US authorities seized them.
Washington has claimed it has the right to seize the cargo and assume ownership because the money that Iran earned from such oil exports went to fund the Pasdaran, which the US has designated as a terrorist organization.
Under US law, the money seized in such cases linked to terrorism may be allocated to the US Victims of State-Sponsored Terrorism Fund, which pays compensation to Americans injured by terrorists or to the survivors of such victims.
It isn’t clear why the suit was just filed now. But it is not a dispute between the Trump and Biden Administrations over sanctions enforcement since it was the Biden Administration that seized the funds in the first place.