Wednesday, January 18, 2017

Eye on Iran: Trump Victory Slows Business Investment in Iran


   EYE ON IRAN
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Small and midsize companies are rethinking or delaying entry to Iran following the election of Donald Trump, a break from their bigger counterparts which have struck recent deals despite concerns of fresh sanctions. Anubhav Singh, the head of global sales and marketing at South African telecommunications-equipment maker Afripipes, said his company was halting its postdeal exploration of the Iranian market as a result of Mr. Trump's election. "We're waiting to see what Trump's policies are with respect to Iran and then take it from there," he said... Smaller companies, because of their size, can't as easily absorb losses from ventures that have to be scrapped because of sanctions. In the past, U.S. sanctions have had a chilling effect on companies dealing with Iran because some of them apply on any company with American connections.

Iran's president on Tuesday compared talk of renegotiating its nuclear accord to "converting a shirt back to cotton," and said U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's talk of doing so is "mainly slogans." ... Iran's President Hassan Rouhani told reporters that "renegotiation has no meaning at all." "Mr. Trump has so far made many remarks on the deal," he added. "These are mainly slogans. I do not see it as likely that something happens in practice." He said the deal is beneficial to the United States, but that Trump "doesn't understand this." ... "There will be no negotiations on the nuclear deal," Rouhani said. "The deal has been finalized and it was approved in the U.N. Security Council."

Iran's persistent use of cruel and inhuman punishments, including floggings, amputations and forced blinding over the past year, exposes the authorities' utterly brutal sense of justice, said Amnesty International. Hundreds are routinely flogged in Iran each year, sometimes in public. In the most recent flogging case recorded by Amnesty International, a journalist was lashed 40 times in Najaf Abad, Esfahan Province, on 5 January after a court found him guilty of inaccurately reporting the number of motorcycles confiscated by police in the city. "The authorities' prolific use of corporal punishment, including flogging, amputation and blinding, throughout 2016 highlights the inhumanity of a justice system that legalizes brutality. These cruel and inhuman punishments are a shocking assault on human dignity and violate the absolute international prohibition on torture and other ill-treatment," said Randa Habib, Amnesty International's Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa. "The latest flogging of a journalist raises alarms that the authorities intend to continue the spree of cruel punishments we have witnessed over the past year into 2017."

IRAN NUCLEAR DEAL

Iran's foreign minister says U.S. President-elect Donald Trump "will be surprised" if he tries to renegotiate the hard-won nuclear deal reached by the Obama administration and other world powers with the Islamic Republic. Mohammad Javad Zarif told a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos that he's taking a "wait and see" attitude about the Trump administration and "The jury is still... the jury is not even yet convened." Pressed by The Associated Press afterward on Wednesday, Zarif said it "won't be the end of the world if he (Trump) tries to walk away from the deal." "He wants to surprise people, so he will be surprised," if he does, Zarif said with a smile, without elaborating. Zarif also criticized the Obama administration, saying it "did not implement their side of the bargain in a full and complete way" - notably about unspecified difficulties faced by Iranian banks.

Mr. Rouhani, fending off domestic critics, pointed out to his audience that Iran was now able to sell $70 billion worth of oil until the end of the Iranian calendar year, on March 20. "Without the deal, that would have been $32 or $33 billion," he said. "If not for the deal, where would we have deducted this money from? From nurses', from teachers' salary? Put health and treatment projects on hold?" "What were we to do?" he added.

A senior European Union diplomat said on Tuesday that the foreign policy team of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump had misunderstood the Iran nuclear deal and that it was not up for renegotiation... "There is a misunderstanding that you can renegotiate this agreement. This cannot be done," Helga Schmid, Secretary General of the European Union's foreign policy service in Brussels, said of the deal brokered by the bloc between Iran, the United States, France, Germany, Britain, Russia and China. "It's a multilateral agreement, that cannot be renegotiated bilaterally," she said, pointing out that the deal has also been endorsed by the U.N. Security Council.

The European Union has informally contacted the incoming Trump administration to clarify "misunderstanding" about the Iran nuclear deal which he has threated to scrap, an EU diplomatic source said Tuesday... "Some informal outreach was done to the new US administration to explain the added value of the deal," the source said. "There has been a lot of misunderstanding out there ... It is a multilateral agreement; if one side steps away from it, the others can do the same." The source said the EU was determined to stick with the accord and was "working very much hand in hand with China and Russia on this." "We see this deal as very important, as having averted a potential major crisis in a region running high with tensions," the source added.

U.S.-IRAN RELATIONS

Iranian officials said Wednesday they were strongly opposed to the United States joining Syrian peace talks in Kazakhstan next week, local media reported. "We are hostile to their presence and we have not invited them," Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said late Tuesday, according to the Tasnim news agency. That goes against the position of the other two organisers of the talks -- Russia and Turkey -- which have said the new US administration of Donald Trump should be represented in Astana on Monday. Ali Shamkhani, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council which oversees international coordination on the Syrian war, confirmed on Wednesday that Iran had refused to invite the US. "There is no reason for the United States to participate in the organising of political initiatives in the Syrian crisis and it is out of the question that they should have a role in the Astana negotiations," he said, according to the official IRNA news agency.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, speaking separately on Tuesday at a news conference broadcast live on state television, said: "Iran, Russia and Turkey managed to bring a ceasefire to Syria ... It shows these three powers have influence. "The (Syrian) armed groups have accepted the invitation of these three countries and are going to Astana." Asked why the United States and Saudi Arabia had no direct role in the talks, Rouhani said: "Some countries are not attending the talks, and their role was destructive. They were helping the terrorists."

Nizar Zakka, a Lebanese-born U.S. permanent resident on hunger strike in Tehran's Evin Prison since December 8, 2016, has been moved to a ward for common criminals to force him to stop, his American lawyer told the Campaign for Human Rights in Iran. Jason Poblete added that his client meanwhile continues to be denied medical and consular services. "We have a source in the facility who told us that he was being punished for being on hunger strike," said Jason Poblete in an interview on January 11, 2017. "He was moved to a room with 60 other men and forced to sleep on the floor side by side with common criminals." Zakka, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison in September 2016, is seeking his immediate release, and access to consular and medical services, which he has been denied since being detained. Poblete also told the Campaign that Zakka was told that he would be allowed to speak to his family if he stopped the strike: "They are trying to get him to eat as a condition for getting the things he wants. So, obviously the hunger strike is having an effect."

SANCTIONS ENFORCEMENT

Toronto-Dominion Bank (TD Bank), a financial institution headquartered in Toronto, Canada agreed to pay $516,105 to settle its potential civil liability for violations of the US sanctions on Iran and Cuba. TD Bank processed 39 transactions totaling $515,071 between Dec. 1, 2008 and March 28, 2012, to or through the United States in apparent violation of the Iranian transactions and sanctions regulations, the US Treasury Department said.

SANCTIONS RELIEF

Outotec has agreed with National Iranian Copper Industries Company (NICICO) on the delivery of two sulfuric acid plants for the Sarcheshmeh and Khatoon Abad copper smelters in the Kerman province in Iran. The value of the orders, approximately EUR 50 million, has been covered by a confirmed Letter of Credit and booked in Outotec's Q4/2016 order intake. Outotec's scope of delivery includes engineering, main process equipment and instrumentation for the acid plants as well as spare parts and supervisory services for installation and commissioning. Outotec's deliveries will take place in mid-2018.

A 12-member business delegation from Germany is planning to visit Iran February 5-8 to seek cooperation opportunities, Dawood Nazirizadeh, management consultant and organizer of the business trip told Trend January 13. "We will be in Tehran February 5-6 and in Tabriz February 6-8. The companies are from different business fields, mostly chemistry, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and consulting," he said. According to Nazirizadeh, a German deputy minister of economy will accompany the delegation. "There will be meetings with Iran and Tabriz chambers of commerce and with different ministries in the areas of renewable energy and innovation." "Most of the companies want to have a first impression on Iran's business. Some of them want to open a branch or hire some staff in Iran," Nazirizadeh further said.

HUMAN RIGHTS

An Iranian bodybuilder has been arrested for publishing revealing photos of herself on social media, the judiciary's news agency reported on Wednesday. "One of the female bodybuilders who recently published nude photographs on social networks has been arrested," the agency said. In Iran, "nude" can refer to any woman who is not wearing a headscarf or revealing parts of her body such as arms and legs that must be covered in public. The unnamed bodybuilder has been sent to prison because she was unable to post bail of two million rials ($50,000, 47,000 euros), the Mizanonline news agency said. She is thought to be one of two women reported in September to have taken part in an international competition.

Iran's Revolutionary Guards are blocking the granted furlough (temporary release) request of Saeed Malekpour, an Iranian-born Canadian resident who has been in imprisoned in Tehran since 2008, his sister told the Campaign for Human Rights in Iran. Maryam Malekpour, who lives in Canada, also criticized the Canadian government for failing to bring her brother back home. "Initially, we, including Saeed and his lawyer, requested furlough but the prosecutor would not agree," she said. "Now, both the prosecutor and the prison warden have agreed, but the Revolutionary Guards is opposed." "Saeed's lawyers wanted to request a review of his case, but he had heard that the Revolutionary Guards could restore his death sentence, so we decided not to do it," she added. "The Revolutionary Guards are not happy that he was not executed." ... "The change of government in Iran (in 2013) and the coming to power of [President Hassan] Rouhani has not made a difference to Saeed's situation either," continued Maryam Malekpour. "We are living a nightmare that seems to have no end. My own personal life has been destroyed. My brother got cancer. My mother is not acting normal. None of us are normal any more and we will never be normal. It wasn't just Saeed whose life has been burned to the ground."

DOMESTIC POLITICS

Iran's parliament passed a five-year economic development plan on Sunday that includes a sharp rise in foreign investment, though Tehran may not achieve that while U.S. president-elect Donald Trump is in office. The plan lets the government arrange up to an average of $30 billion of foreign financing each year, in addition to $15 billion of annual direct foreign investment in Iran, and up to $20 billion of foreign investment conducted with local partners. Such volumes of foreign investment would mark a big increase from levels seen in the past few decades. Since 2000, net inflows of foreign direct investment rarely exceeded $4 billion, according to the World Bank - a small amount by the standards of major emerging markets. Investment has been deterred by red tape and restrictive regulation, and more recently by international sanctions.

OPINION & ANALYSIS

With the death of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Iran's former president and its preeminent fixer, the Islamic Republic has begun the most consequential leadership transition in its four-decade history. Rafsanjani's departure from the scene will change little in the near-term struggle for primacy among the theocracy's squabbling elites, but it is a harbinger of a larger process of generational transition that will determine whether the revolutionary state can sustain itself amidst a myriad of domestic and regional challenges. The echoes of opposition slogans chanted in his funeral march on Tuesday underscore the frustration and uncertainty that is Rafsanjani's ultimate legacy: his shrewd, ruthless pragmatism enabled the Islamic Republic to weather intense crises, but could not overcome the fundamental impasse between the state's ideological imperatives and the expectations of its citizenry and the world... He never wavered in his support for the Islamic Republic, pioneering the use of election rigging as a means of sidelining rivals and overseeing vicious campaigns at home and abroad intended to eliminate its adversaries and extend its influence. He was equally indifferent to Iran's representative institutions and its citizens' basic rights as to the excesses of the regime's ideology. And while he consistently sought to improve Iran's image and relationships abroad, he never proved willing or capable of reining in the regime's reliance on terror and destabilization as a lever of regional influence-which constrained the horizons of Iran's rehabilitation.

In the latest incident of Iranian bullying at sea, four Iranian boats again closed in at high speed to a Navy destroyer in the Straits of Hormuz on Sunday. Once again the U.S. Navy destroyer, USS Mahan, fired warning shots after the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps boats did not respond to requests to slow down. A U.S. Navy official said the warning shots fired on Sunday were just one of seven interactions the Mahan had with Iranian vessels over the weekend. Referring to other similar encounters, the official said there had been "a total of 35 in 2016 that were assessed to be unsafe and unprofessional". The incident is the latest in a string of tense encounters between the two countries the last two years that has included Iranian rocket launches, drones flying over U.S. vessels and the capture of US sailors.






Eye on Iran is a periodic news summary from United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) a program of the American Coalition Against Nuclear Iran, Inc., a tax-exempt organization under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Eye on Iran is not intended as a comprehensive media clips summary but rather a selection of media elements with discreet analysis in a PDA friendly format. For more information please email press@uani.com.

United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) is a non-partisan, broad-based coalition that is united in a commitment to prevent Iran from fulfilling its ambition to become a regional super-power possessing nuclear weapons.  UANI is an issue-based coalition in which each coalition member will have its own interests as well as the collective goal of advancing an Iran free of nuclear weapons.

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