US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller says Iran’s frozen assets will expectedly be transferred to the “final destination” in Qatar in the “coming days or so.”
Speaking at a press briefing on Wednesday, Miller did not give the exact details of the transactions and just said that “they move from South Korea, through banks in Europe, ultimately to these end accounts in Qatar.”
In response to a question about the amount of the assets that Iran had now access to and could spend, which had been held by India, Turkey, Japan and South Korea, he said the US does not have “perfect” visibility into the accounts and how they were being used.
The spokesman, however, explained that Washington does have information to conclude that they were spent down by billions of dollars, in some cases all the way to zero.
Meanwhile, he said Washington has complete visibility into the accounts in Qatar and is able to “lock them down” if it sees that Iran is attempting to take actions that are in violation of the agreement between the two sides and breach the US sanctions.
“I’m not going to get into what the exact technical details are, but we have the full agreement to stop their access to this account going forward,” the spokesperson added.
On Monday, President Joe Biden’s administration issued a blanket waiver for international banks to transfer six billion dollars in frozen Iranian assets from South Korea to Qatar with no concern about Washington’s sanctions.
The report released early Tuesday said the Biden administration has also agreed to release five Iranian citizens held in the United States.
The five Iranian detainees were identified as Mehrdad Moein Ansari, Kambiz Attar Kashani, Reza Sarhangpour Kofrani, Amin Hassanzadeh, and Kaveh Lotfollah Afrasiabi.
It added that Secretary of State Antony Blinken signed off on the sanctions waivers late last week, a month after US and Iranian officials said an agreement in principle was in place on the issue.
In an exclusive interview with the American broadcast television network NBC on Tuesday, Iranian President Ebrahim Raeisi underscored Tehran’s full authority on its recently-released assets, saying it is the Islamic Republic that decides how to spend the funds and that the money will be spent “wherever we need it.”
He added, “This money belongs to the Iranian people, the Iranian government, so the Islamic Republic of Iran will decide what to do with this money.”
Iran’s permanent mission to the United Nations also on Tuesday confirmed that five Iranians detained illegally in the United States on charges of circumventing US sanctions will soon be released as part a prisoner swap deal between Tehran and Washington.
