Iran President Rouhani says 'friends should have defied US sanctions' during COVID-19

President of Iran Hassan Rouhani reprimanded countries with friendly relations with Iran for not standing up to the United States when it imposed sanctions on the country amid a pandemic. According to the tally by John Hopkins University, Iran has reported a total number of 384,666 cases with 22,154 casualties, making it one of the countries worst hit by the pandemic in the Middle East. The sanctions came after the US President, Donald Trump. withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal. 

Sanctions imposed against Iran

President Rouhani reportedly said that no one has come to Iran’s help ever since the pandemic has hit the country. Talking about the sanctions he said that if the US had a “bit of humanity and brain" then it would have offered to lift the sanctions amid the coronavirus pandemic. Rouhani called the US as ‘heartless and evil’. He added that not a single country supported Iran during this hardship and said that they will stand against the US.

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The United States Department of the Treasury has imposed sanctions on six companies for their alleged support to Triliance Petrochemical Co. Ltd., an entity earlier zeroed on by the department for doing business with Iran. The six companies designated by the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) are based in Iran, UAE, and China. As per the US department, these companies were doing business with Triliance, a Hong Kong-based broker that was selling petrochemicals from Iran. Triliance, along with three other petrochemical and petroleum companies, was sanctioned by the United States in January this year for transferring hundreds of millions of dollars worth of exports from the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC), the Islamic Republic's state-run oil company.

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"The Iranian regime uses revenue from petrochemical sales to continue its financing of terrorism and destabilizing foreign agenda. The Trump administration remains committed to targeting those contributing to Iran’s attempts to evade U.S. sanctions by facilitating the illicit sale of Iranian petroleum products around the world," said Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in a statement on September 3. The United States has also imposed sanctions on five other companies for knowingly engaging in a significant transaction for the purchase, acquisition, sale, transport, or marketing of petroleum or petroleum products from Iran. The sanctions of these entities were imposed by the US Department of State, which also sanctioned three individuals who are principal executive officers of the sanctioned entities.  

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(Image Credits: PTI)