The U.S. Treasury Department on Thursday (Jan. 15) announced new sanctions against key Iranian leaders involved in the killing of protesters.
The Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Iranian leaders have been wiring money to banks outside of Iran.
He shared a video message with the Iranian protestors saying, “You are protesting for a noble cause, and the United States support you and your efforts to peacefully oppose the regime’s mismanagement and brutality.”
“Our message to the Iranian leaders is also clear. U.S. Treasury knows you’re frantically wiring funds stolen from Iranian families to banks and financial institutions around the world,” he said.
The Treasury department released a statement on the same day stating the sanctions on the Supreme Leader of Iran and his affiliates were with respect to “serious human rights abuses by the Government of Iran.”
The sanctions are “part of a continued campaign of maximum economic pressure against Iran’s shadow banking, money laundering, and sanctions evasion networks”
They target Iran’s financial, petroleum, and petrochemical sectors which have “impacted the Iranian regime’s ability to sell its petroleum to support its destabilizing behavior and recoup those funds.”
Ali Larijani, the Secretary of the Supreme Council for National Security (SCNS), was sanctioned. He was one of the first Iranian leaders to call for violence to silence the protestors.
18 individuals and entities were also sanctioned for playing critical roles in laundering the proceeds of Iranian petroleum and petrochemical sales to foreign markets as part of the clandestine “shadow banking” networks of sanctioned Iranian financial institutions Bank Melli and Shahr Bank.
“Rather than using these revenues to benefit the Iranian people, who face economic calamity amid crippling inflation and massive deficits caused by the regime’s economic mismanagement, these funds are instead used to finance the regime’s repression of the Iranian people and its support for terrorist groups abroad,” the statement added.
