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Al-Monitor – British officials visited Iran last week to discuss ways of paying the United Kingdom’s decades-old debt to Iran, which Tehran’s envoy to London said is held up by US sanctions.
Iranian Ambassador to the UK Mohsen Baharvand told reporters in London on Friday that Iran had nearly reached an agreement on the debt with the British government this summer.
“We had a deal. We signed it. But two days after the signature of that deal, the UK government said they could not implement it because of US sanctions,” The Guardian quoted Baharvand as saying.
Baharvand said he is hopeful for an agreement and that the “obstacles are not insurmountable.”
“We are trying. We should not be that pessimistic. We are working with our Foreign Office colleagues maybe to reach that deal. We are in the process of discussions,” he said.
Baharvand said the British delegation to Tehran last week discussed the release of imprisoned British nationals, including Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian charity worker who was arrested in 2016.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s family says she was told by Iranian authorities that her detention is tied to a debt of more than 400 million pounds ($527 million) owed to Iran by the UK over Chieftain tanks that were paid upfront by the former shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. When he was overthrown in 1979, the sale was canceled but the money was not returned. Iran denies any linkage between the debt and the detainees.
In a statement to Bloomberg, the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said it will “continue to explore options to resolve this 40-year-old case.”
In addition to Zaghari-Ratcliffe, Iran is also holding retired British-Iranian engineer Anoosheh Ashoori as well as Morad Tahbaz, an environmentalist who holds British, American and Iranian citizenship.
