WASHINGTON (Dispatches) -- The United States has imposed sanctions on five people, including a Turkish businessman, and 26 companies for allegedly facilitating oil sales on behalf of Iran.
The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced the measures on Thursday.
It named some of the targets as Turkish businessman Sitki Ayan and his network of companies as well as Ayan’s son Bahaddin Ayan, his associate Kasim Oztas, and two other Turkish citizens.
“Ayan has established business contracts to sell Iranian oil worth hundreds of millions of dollars to buyers,” in China, the United Arab Emirates, and Europe, OFAC claimed in a statement.
The sanctions freeze the U.S.-based assets of the targeted individuals and companies, and ban Americans from dealing with them.
The United States began a campaign of “maximum pressure” against Iran under former US president Donald Trump.
As part of the campaign, Trump took the US out of a nuclear deal between Iran and world countries, and returned all the sanctions that the accord had lifted.
On his campaign trail, his successor Joe Biden alleged an interest to return Washington to the deal. The Biden administration has, however, not only stopped short of doing so, but has also been bringing the Islamic Republic under multiple rounds of fresh economic measures, in what Tehran slams as the Biden team’s continuation of Trump’s anti-Iran policies.
On October 3, 2018, the International Court of Justice issued an order that temporarily, but unanimously required the U.S. to remove any impediments on the importation of foodstuffs as well as medicines and medical devices to Iran.
The U.S. has, however, been refraining from implementing the verdict too.

Belgium Suspends Iran
Prisoners Swap Treaty

Belgium’s highest court has suspended a treaty on prisoner exchanges with Iran leaving it to the Constitutional Court on whether to finally cancel the agreement.
The implementation of the treaty would mean the release of an Iranian diplomat, Assadollah Assadi, from Belgium prision.

“Belgium knows or must know that Iran will not effectively execute the sentence,” the court said in a press release.
After suspending the treaty, the Constitutional Court will now have to come to a final decision on whether to cancel the treaty “within three months.”
In June 2018, Belgian authorities stated that the Belgian police had intercepted a car carrying homemade explosives and a detonation device, claiming that Assadi had handed the materials to two people in Belgium earlier. Assadi, himself, was apprehended in Germany the next day and told that he could not apply his diplomatic immunity.
A Belgian court then sentenced the diplomat, who serves as the third counselor at Iran’s Embassy in Vienna, to 20 years in prison after accusing him of plotting an alleged attack against the anti-Tehran terrorist Mujahedin Khalq Organization (MKO) cult.
Tehran has condemned imprisonment of Assadi on false terror-related charges, calling for his immediate release. Iran says the process of detention and trial of Assadi has been flawed and in violation of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.
The MKO has been responsible for numerous assassinations and bombings against top-ranking Iranian officials since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Out of the nearly 17,000 Iranians martyred in terrorist attacks since the Islamic Revolution, about 12,000 have fallen victim to the MKO’s acts of terror.