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Reply #1: turns out it's not illegal [View All]

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xchrom Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Oct-06-11 10:01 AM
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1. turns out it's not illegal
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-05/lax-law-gives-u-s-subsidiaries-an-opening-to-sell-to-bellicose-iran-view.html

Lax Law Gives U.S. Subsidiaries an Opening to Sell to Iran: View

“U.S. and international officials appear to agree that the sanctions have not, to date, hurt Iran’s economy to the point at which the core Western goals on Iran’s nuclear program can be accomplished.”

That was the conclusion of a report last month by Kenneth Katzman of the Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan group that writes policy and legal analysis for lawmakers.

A prime example of the porousness of the sanctions can be found in November’s issue of Bloomberg Markets magazine, which focuses on the business ethics of the petrochemical conglomerate owned by Charles and David Koch, the billionaire brothers who are big donors to conservative political causes. Starting in the 1990s and until at least 2007, a Koch Industries Inc. subsidiary with offices in Italy and Germany circumvented the U.S. embargo by selling millions of dollars of equipment to Iran’s oil industry.

Did Koch break the law? It seems not. The company relied on a loophole in the 1996 Iran Sanctions Act and subsequent laws and executive orders that make it illegal for U.S. companies to do business in Iran’s oil sector, the lifeblood of the rogue nation’s economy. This weakness in the sanctions regime has allowed opportunistic foreign subsidiaries of American companies to conduct business in Iran as long as American or U.S.-based employees weren’t involved in the transactions.

A subsidiary, Koch-Glitsch, sold products to a unit of the state-owned National Iranian Petrochemical Co. to help build the largest plant in the world to process natural gas into methanol, a compound used in plastics, paints and chemicals. According to documents obtained by Bloomberg Markets, Koch-Glitsch also sought to work on the expansion of the largest refinery in Iran and the development of South Pars, the world’s largest natural- gas field.




*** i think it's fair to coclude the sanctions were never serious -- and all that law business & regulation business was window dressing for u.s. official belligerence.
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