Iran, acting on orders from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has withdrawn around $75 billion from Europe to prevent the assets from being blocked under threatened new sanctions over Tehran’s disputed nuclear ambitions, an Iranian weekly said.
“Part of Iran’s assets in European banks have been converted to gold and shares and another part has been transferred to Asian banks,” Mohsen Talaie, deputy foreign minister in charge of economic affairs, was quoted as saying.
Iranian officials were not immediately available to comment on the report in Shahrvand-e Emrouz, a moderate weekly, which did not specify the time period for the withdrawals which it said were ordered by Ahmadinejad.
“About $75 billion of Iran’s foreign assets which were under threat of being blocked were wired back to Iran based on Ahmadinejad’s order,” the weekly said.
Iran’s Etemad-e Melli newspaper, also quoting Talai, last week also reported that the world’s fourth-largest oil exporter was withdrawing assets from European banks but did not give any figures.
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Commentary: Good news. Not only does Europe deserve to be sanctioned for its sycophantic attitude towards the US Neocons and their imperial follies, but that money will have no problems finding a safe haven in, say, Russian banks.
In the meanwhile, the barrel of crude almost reach $140 today, Saudi promises to increase production notwithstanding. This is going to be one mean summer…
The Iranians did the same thing once before in January of 2006. The 75 billion must be money they accumulated since then.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4632144.stm
Saker, what are your thoughts on peak oil? Do you see oil prices reaching a point where Europe or Japan openly defy U.S. sanctions and invest in Iran?
Saker, what are your thoughts on peak oil?
My main thought on this issue is that I am not competent to express an informed guess. Oil is not a regular commodity and there are simply too many factors which I am not aware off which influence the price of oil for me to make anything but a most pedestrian guess that considering demand, the falling greenback, the US economy in a recession, and the wars in the Middle-East the price of oil should head up. How far it could go I cannot tell.
Do you see oil prices reaching a point where Europe or Japan openly defy U.S. sanctions and invest in Iran?
No. Europe has turned itself into the voiceless and spineless sycophantic colony of the US Empire and it will not defy its Neocon bosses in the USA (not to mention that a lot of European leaders are themselves Neocons, think Sarkozy here).
I don’t know about the rest of Europe but certainly the British establishment is culturally tied to America to an extraordinary degree. The former Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone once observed that Tony Blair was surrounded by legions of ghastly little advisors and think tank people who “feel that Britain is second rate and “want to be somewhere between Washington and Hollywood with loads of glamour, loads of money, loads of sex and no real politics (ie. forget any outdated notions of social justice) I find that concept repellent”
A symptom of this is that last year the Oxford University student debating society was to host a debate on the one state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict but the student officers backed off because they were got at by the likes of Alan Dershowitz.
I used to be at Oxford in the early Nineties and can imagine how they might have feared that offending the Zionist lobby might close doors to them, especially in the US, thereby harming their political careers.