February 28, 2020
The United States has sanctioned several Chinese firms for buying Iranian crude oil and urged China to take the “long view” and side with the Iranian people rather than helping Iran to fund terrorism.
But the amount of oil China was accused China of buying from Iran was very small, less than 2 percent of what Iran used to export to the world.
Iran is understood to be sending oil to China, which gets the first 250,000 barrels a day free as repayment on a debt, an unknown quantity to Syria, which gets the oil on credit, and unknown quantities, presumably at great discount, on the black market.
The Treasury Department said the recently sanctioned companies had “collectively transferred the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars” to Iran’s oil company throughout 2019. But even assuming a full billion dollars had been paid at the full market price in 2019 of $62 a barrel, that would amount to a mere 44,000 barrels a day of crude, which is less than 2 percent of the 2.5 million barrels a day of oil Iran used to sell to the world.
In an interview with the South China Morning Post, Brian Hook, the senior US State Department official dealing with Iran policy full time, urged China to take the “long view” so as not to promote instability in the Middle East by funding Iranian terrorism.