US sanctions Malta companies used in Iran’s nuclear ‘hide-and-seek’ game

The sanctions were imposed last Friday on Marble Shipping Limited and the Bushehr Shipping Company, which are owned by Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines, and another company ISI Maritime Limitd, which allows Iran to sidestep international sanctions.

The companies are banned from all transactions with US companies and individuals, and their assets under US jurisdiction were frozen.

Stuart Levey, U.S. Treasury under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, last Friday said Iran uses non-Iranian shippers and freight forwarders to obtain and export dangerous materials. “As the vice tightens, we expect this pattern to increase. So, over the past year, OFAC increased enforcement efforts in the shipping and freight forwarding sectors, and also investigated a number of sanctions violations.”

MaltaToday has established how the office of the Maltese-owned Royal-Med Shipping Agency, at 143 Tower Road, Sliema, is being used to house what the US Treasury Department has termed “front companies”.

According to US Treasury Secretary Tim Geither, Irisl is using these front companies to engage in “deceptive behaviour such as renaming ships to overcome the impact of sanctions and increased scrutiny of its behaviour.”

MaltaToday has located 13 Irisl-owned companies in Sliema, while another address in Qormi hosts 19 shipping companies whose shareholders are Ebrahim Mohammadnabi and Hassan Djalilzadeh, two senior officials at Irisl, registered in Teheran; and at 147/1, St Lucia Street, Valletta, 10 Irisl-owned companies are located. They are all subsidiaries of ISI Maritime, an Irisl company.

The central node of this network is Royal-Med shipping agency, which is the agent for a private, Iranian company – the Hafiz Darya Shipping Lines (HDS). HDS was created in 2009 shortly after the US and UK hit Irisl with trading bans over its alleged role in supplying Iran’s nuclear weapons programme, to take over IRISL’s container business as part of a government privatisation move.

HDS acts as the ship manager of various Malta-flagged ships that previously belonged to Irisl, but which have now been transferred to these shell companies, with the ship names changed from their Iranian appellations into innocuous English-sounding names.