Matthew Vella Malta branch included in ban on UK firms to trade with IRISL. British companies will not be allowed to do business with Iran’s national shipping line, whose Mediterranean hub is located at the Malta freeport, due to a trading ban announced this week over its alleged role in supplying Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons programme.
Sarah McCarthy-Fry, the Treasury Minister, said that the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines (IRISL) had “transported goods for both Iran’s ballistic missile and nuclear programmes.”
IRISL established its Mediterranean hub in Malta back in 2004.
Under the UK ban, “financial and credit institutions will no longer be able to enter into new transactions or business relationships with these entities, nor to continue existing transactions.”
Iran is subject to three sets of United Nations sanctions targeting its arms trade and nuclear industry. Other unilateral sanctions imposed by the United States, and by European countries, have focused on cutting off the flow of Western goods to the Iranian market.
Last week, a German ship leased to the company was stopped and searched in Malta where customs officials discovered caches of ammunition en route to Syria in violation of UN sanctions. It is also alleged to have smuggled in materials for Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons programme.
US troops boarded the German-owned freighter and found eight containers full of ammunition, allegedly headed to Syria from Iran.
The operation was carried out on the freighter Hansa India in the Gulf of Suez, where seven containers full of 7.62 millimeter ammunition suitable for Kalashnikov rifles were discovered. An eighth container was full of cartridges suitable for the manufacture of additional rounds.
Investigators suspect the arms were part of an Iranian shipment bound for either the Syrian army or for Hezbollah, the militant Islamist group.
According to Leonhardt & Blumberg, the German company that owns the freighter, the ship has for years been under charter to the state-owned shipping company Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines.
Following an intervention by the German government, the US allowed the ship to continue on to its destination in Malta, where the containers were secured.
In 2008, the US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control designated IRISL, and its Maltese affiliate, as part of “the broader pattern of deception and fabrication that Iran uses to advance its nuclear and missile programs.”
The OFAC claims that IRISL employs the use of generic terms to describe shipments so as not to attract the attention of shipping authorities and created and made use of cover entities to conduct official, IRISL business.
An example of this was the transportation of a shipment of a precursor chemical, destined for use in Iran’s missile program, back in 2007. The end user of the chemical was Parchin Chemical Industries, an entity listed by the United States as a subordinate of Iran’s Defense Industries Organization (DIO).
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