According to three sources acquainted with the situation, the US has seized an Iranian oil cargo stored on a Russian-operated ship near Greece and will transport it to the US aboard another vessel.
Due to EU sanctions, Greek officials impounded the Iranian-flagged Pegas, which had 19 Russian crew members on board, near the shore of the southern island of Evia last month.
According to them, the ship was impounded as part of EU sanctions against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. However, the vessel was later released due to a misunderstanding concerning sanctions regarding its owners.
Since then, the ship, renamed Lana on March 1 and flying the Iranian flag since May 1, has stayed in Greek seas. Previously, it was Russian-flagged.
According to a source at Greece’s shipping ministry, the US Department of Justice ‘advised Greece that the cargo on the tanker is Iranian oil.’
‘The cargo has been relocated to another ship contracted by the United States,’ the source continued, without going into further detail.
The revelation comes as the US placed penalties on what it called a Russian-backed oil smuggling and money laundering network for Iran’s Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force on Wednesday, despite Washington’s efforts to resurrect a nuclear deal with Iran.
Requests for reaction from US and Russian officials were not immediately returned.
A further Western source acquainted with the situation verified the seizure, adding that the cargo was transported onto the Liberian-flagged tanker Ice Energy, which is operated by the Greek shipping company Dynacom.
A Dynacom source verified that ‘the oil was being transferred from the tanker to Dynacom’s Ice Energy, which will subsequently sail to the United States.’
Pegas was one of five ships sanctioned by the United States on February 22 – two days before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – as part of larger sanctions against Promsvyazbank, a bank Washington regarded as crucial to Russia’s defence sector. Transmorflot, the vessel’s Russian owner, was later designated on May 8.
According to the United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) advocacy group, which monitors Iran-related tanker activity, the Pegas carried roughly 700,000 barrels of crude oil from Iran’s Sirri Island on August 19, 2021.
According to UANI data, the Pegas transported over 3 million barrels of Iranian oil in 2021, with over 2.6 million of those barrels ending up in China.
In 2020, Washington seized four cargoes of Iranian petroleum heading for Venezuela and shifted them with the assistance of unnamed international partners onto two other ships, which subsequently travelled to the US.
Those seizures occurred after a U.S. district judge issued an order for the cargoes of the shipments in a civil forfeiture action.
President Joe Biden’s administration has been in indirect talks to resurrect a 2015 deal that former President Donald Trump abandoned, in which world powers relaxed international financial sanctions on Tehran in exchange for limits on its nuclear programme.
While talks appeared to be on the verge of restarting the nuclear deal in March, they were derailed by last-minute Russian demands and the question of whether Washington would remove the Revolutionary Guards from its terrorist list.
The chances of restoring the nuclear deal, according to Washington’s Iran envoy, are tenuous at best, and Washington is prepared to impose sanctions on Iran.
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