British officers visited Iran final week to debate methods of paying the UK’s decades-old debt to Iran, which Tehran’s envoy to London stated is held up by US sanctions.
Iranian Ambassador to the UK Mohsen Baharvand instructed reporters in London on Friday that Iran had practically reached an settlement on the debt with the British authorities this summer season.
“We had a deal. We signed it. However two days after the signature of that deal, the UK authorities stated they might not implement it due to US sanctions,” The Guardian quoted Baharvand as saying.
Baharvand stated he’s longing for an settlement and that the “obstacles aren’t insurmountable.”
“We are attempting. We shouldn’t be that pessimistic. We’re working with our International Workplace colleagues perhaps to succeed in that deal. We’re within the means of discussions,” he stated.
Baharvand stated the British delegation to Tehran final week mentioned the discharge of imprisoned British nationals, together with Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian charity employee who was arrested in 2016.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s household says she was instructed by Iranian authorities that her detention is tied to a debt of greater than 400 million kilos ($527 million) owed to Iran by the UK over Chieftain tanks that had been paid upfront by the previous shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. When he was overthrown in 1979, the sale was canceled however the cash was not returned. Iran denies any linkage between the debt and the detainees.
In a statement to Bloomberg, the UK’s International, Commonwealth and Growth Workplace stated it should “proceed to discover choices to resolve this 40-year-old case.”
Along with Zaghari-Ratcliffe, Iran can be holding retired British-Iranian engineer Anoosheh Ashoori in addition to Morad Tahbaz, an environmentalist who holds British, American and Iranian citizenship.
