Mediaboss Marketing

Indian state refiners will cut oil imports from Iran in 2017/18 by a fifth, as New Delhi takes a more assertive stance over an impasse on a giant gas field that it wants awarded to an Indian consortium, sources familiar with the matter said.

India, Iran's biggest oil buyer after China, was among a handful of countries that continued to deal with the Persian Gulf nation despite Western sanctions over Tehran's nuclear programme.

However, previously close ties have been strained since the lifting of some sanctions last year as Iran adopts a bolder approach in trying to get the best deal for its oil and gas.

Unhappy with Tehran, India's oil ministry has asked state refiners to cut imports of Iranian oil.

"We are cutting gradually, and we will cut more if there is no progress in the matter of the award of Farzad B gas field to our company," one of the Indian sources said.

Indian refiners told a National Iranian Oil Co (NIOC) representative about their plans to cut oil imports by a fifth to 190,000 barrels per day (bpd) from 240,000 bpd, officials present at the meeting said.

Indian Oil Corp and Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals Corp will reduce imports by 20,000 bpd each to about 80,000 bpd. Bharat Petroleum Corp and Hindustan Petroleum Corp will together cut imports by about 10,000 bpd to roughly 30,000 bpd, they said.

In turn, NIOC threatened to cut the discount it offers to Indian buyers on freight from 80 percent to about 60 percent, the officials added.

No comment was available from the Indian companies or NIOC.

Cutting imports from Iran amid an OPEC-led supply cut aimed at propping up the market exposes India's refiners to the risk of struggling to find reasonably priced alternatives.

"We expect that the market is currently undersupplied and that the draws in inventory are coming," U.S. investment bank Jefferies said in a note to clients this week, adding it expected crude prices of around $60 a barrel by the fourth quarter.

Despite this, Indian oil industrials said they saw no major impact from cutting Iranian imports, mainly due to their specific requirements.

"Their main requirement is lighter oil, and light oilwill remain in oversupply despite OPEC cuts, as OPEC cuts are mainly medium heavy sour," said Ehsan ul Haq of KBC Energy Economics.

Prices of light crude have fallen recently, thanks largely to soaring output in the United States, which is not involved in the production cuts led by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.

From April last year to February 2017, India imported 542,400 bpd from Iran, compared to 225,522 bpd a year earlier. Average oil volumes supplied by Iran over this period were the highest on record.

INDIA'S GAS PLAN

At the heart of the spat is that a group of Indian oil companies headed by Oil and Natural Gas Corp wants to develop Iran's Farzad B gas field.

Iran has yet to hand out a concession that would allow its development.

ONGC Videsh has submitted a $3 billion development plan to Iranian authorities to develop the offshore field estimated to hold reserves of 12.5 trillion cubic feet, with a lifetime of 30 years.

Under sanctions, Iran was banned from the global financial system, preventing the field's development.

India was one of a few countries still supplying Iran with goods, devising a complex payment mechanism to help Tehran access non-sanctioned items including medicines.

As new options have opened up for Tehran since the lifting of sanctions, Iran may now be awaiting better bids for Farzad B.

Link:
India to cut Iranian oil purchases in row over gas field - Moneycontrol.com

By Nathan Layne | NEW YORK

NEW YORK Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani went to Turkey to meet with the country's president and sought meetings with U.S. government officials in an attempt to end U.S. prosecution of a wealthy Turkish gold trader charged with conspiring to violate U.S. sanctions on Iran, Manhattan federal prosecutors said.

The moves were disclosed in a letter on Friday to U.S. District Judge Richard Berman, who is overseeing the case in which the trader, Reza Zarrab, is accused of conspiring with others to conduct illegal transactions through U.S. banks on behalf of Iran's government and other Iranian entities.

The new disclosures highlight the politically charged nature of a case that expanded in scope earlier this week with the arrest in New York of an executive at a Turkish state-owned bank charged with conspiring with Zarrab to evade sanctions.

Zarrab, a dual national of Iran and Turkey, had been arrested in 2013 in a corruption probe of people with close ties to Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who was prime minister of Turkey at the time. Erdogan is currently president.

In the letter prosecutors said Giuliani and former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey - both recently added to Zarrab's legal team - traveled to Turkey shortly after February 24 to meet with Erdogan to discuss ways to end the prosecution. Giuliani informed the office of Attorney General Jeff Sessions about the planned trip, according to the letter.

Acting U.S. Attorney Joon Kim in Manhattan said that Mukasey and Giuliani, who is a close ally of President Donald Trump, had also sought to meet with other officials in the U.S. government on the issue. "Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Mukasey's efforts are aimed at reaching a disposition in the case," Kim wrote in the letter.

Kim has sought to question whether Giuliani and Mukasey should be allowed to represent Zarrab given the potential conflicts of interest. Zarrab allegedly victimized at least eight large banks which are current or former clients of Giuliani and Mukasey's law firms.

Kim had called earlier this week for a special hearing to make sure Zarrab understands the potential conflict.

Benjamin Brafman, an attorney for Zarrab, responded in a letter to the court on Friday, saying he would consent to a limited hearing but stressed that he believed the prosecution had no right to question the actions of Giuliani and Mukasey.

"That information quite frankly is none of the Government's business," Brafman wrote.

(reporting by Nathan Layne; Editing by Cynthia Osterman and Mary Milliken)

WASHINGTON President Donald Trump has neither a clear White House tax plan nor adequate staff yet to see through a planned tax reform, according to interviews with people in the administration, in Congress and among U.S. tax experts.

BEIJING/WASHINGTON Beijing sought to play down tensions with the United States and put on a positive face on Friday as the U.S. administration slammed China on a range of business issues ahead of President Xi Jinping's first meeting with President Donald Trump.

Originally posted here:
Giuliani sought to end prosecution of Turk in Iran sanctions case - Reuters

Iran's defense ministercalled on the U.S. Thursday to leave the Persian Gulf, apparentlyin response to recent accusations from a top U.S. military official that Iran's foreign policy had a negative influence in the region.

Iranian Defense Minister Brig. Gen. Hossein Dehghan said Washington behaved like an "insane armed robber" by establishing dozens ofbases in the Gulf and conducting military operations on foreign soil, Iran's Mehr News Agency reported. A day earlier,U.S. Army Gen. Joseph Votel, head of the U.S. Central Command,called Iran "the greatest long-term threat to stability" in the Gulf. Dehghan questioned the U.S.role in the region and urged Washington to withdraw.

What are Americans doing in the Persian Gulf? They had better get out of this region and not cause nuisance for the regional countries, Dehghan said, according to a press release published by Iran's Tasnim News Agency.

The U.S. has allied itself diplomatically and militarily with majority-Sunni Muslim Gulf Arab nations such as Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Qatar, all of which have expressed concern over majority-Shiite Muslim Iran's influence in the Middle East. The Gulf Arab faction, especially Saudi Arabia, has been engaged in a proxy war of regional influence with Iran, with both sides sponsoring opposing combatants in conflicts in Syria and Yemen and opposing political movements throughout the region.

Under former President Barack Obama, the U.S. and Iran signed a landmark nuclear treaty that would lift years of sanctions on Iran in exchange for Tehran limiting its nuclear development program. This deal was sharply criticized by conservatives in both countries and President Donald Trump has threatened to renegotiate or abandon it altogether. Dehghan was a proponent ofthis agreement.

Tensions have recently risen between the U.S. and Iran over a series of Iranian missile tests. Both nations have conducted multiple military exercises on opposite sides of the Gulf since the beginning of the year.

Read the original post:
Iran Military Tells US to Get Out of Persian Gulf - Newsweek

Wall Street Journal reporter Jay Solomons new book is The Iran Wars: Spy Games, Bank Battles, and the Secret Deals that Reshaped the Middle East. Solomon has broken many stories on the Iran beat for the Journal. His new book is must reading on the critical national security challenge presented by the regime of the mad mullahs that is on a glide path to the acquisition of nuclear weapons with the invaluable assistance of the Obama administration.

Solomons new book is reviewed in the current issue of the Jewish Review of Books, which I just received in the mail yesterday. I think I have attentively followed the news regarding Iran, but I somehow failed to absorb the details of the story with which Jordan Chandler Hirsch opens his review:

In April 2009, a young Iranian, Shahram Amiri, disappeared in Medina, Saudi Arabia. Ostensibly there to perform the hajj, Amiri had in fact brokered a deal with the CIA to provide information on Irans nuclear program. Leaving his wife and child behind in Iran and a shaving kit in an empty Saudi hotel room, Amiri fled to America, received asylum, pocketed $5 million, and resettled in Arizona. Formerly a scientist at Malek Ashtar University, one of several institutes harboring Irans nuclear endeavors, Amiri conveyed the structure of the program and intelligence about a number of key research sites, including the secret facility at Fordow.

The story might have ended there. But according to Jay Solomon, chief foreign affairs correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and author of The Iran Wars, what happened next emerged as one of the strangest episodes in modern American espionage. A year after Amiri defected, he appeared on YouTube, claiming that the CIA had drugged and kidnapped him. In fact, Iranian intelligence had begun threatening his family through their intelligence assets in the United States [Ed. note: Solomon reports in the book that Iranian threats against Amiris wife and son left in Iran had been conveyed to Amiri through a sophisticated network of assets maintained in the United States]. Buckling under that pressure, Amiri demanded to re-defect. In July 2010, he returned to a raucous welcome in Tehran, claimed he had been working for Iran all along, and reunited with his son. Of course this was not the end of the story. Amiri soon disappeared, and in August 2016, shortly after Solomons book was published, he was hanged.

Solomon reported on Amiri for the Journal in a 2010 article that is accessible online here. This past August David Sanger reported on Amiris execution for the New York Times in How an Iranians spy saga ends, 6 years later: Hes executed.

Hirschs JRB review of Solomons book is posted online here.

Via Mosaic Editors Picks.

Continue reading here:
From the Iran file - Power Line (blog)

At Mondays Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Iran there was, given the political environment, rare and welcomed unanimity. Ranking member Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.) remarked that although he voted against the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on Iran, he doesnt think it would be wise to withdraw. He continued:

Having said that, Irans activities today are as bad as they have ever been and probably worse. They are certainly increasing their terrorist sponsorship in the Middle East as we see in so many different countries in that region. Their record on violating the ballistic missile obligations are well known and well understood. Their human rights violations against their own citizens are horrible, one of the worst countries in the world. They violate the arms embargo and the list goes on and on. So, it is appropriate to get this Committee to look at what we can do to make sure that first, the Iran nuclear agreement is honored so that Iran does not become a nuclear weapons state, but then secondly, look at those activities that were not covered under the JCPOA as to how we can play a stronger role.

Chairman Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) had a similar take:

One of my criticisms of the JCPOA was that it would become our de facto Middle East policy and Iran would expand their destabilizing activities. I think we are seeing a lot of that today.Regionally, weve seen an escalation in Iranian intervention.Iran, along with its allies in Russia, has continued to prop up Assad at the cost of countless lives in Syria.Irans support to the Shia militias in Iraq threatens the interests of Sunnis and Kurds alike, not to mention the Shia in Iraq that dont subscribe to the anti-American, zero-sum politics of the militias that are there.

Iran is arming the Houthis in Yemen, who are in turn attacking our Saudi allies and targeting our ships.Yemen now faces a humanitarian crisis unprecedented in its history. Iran remains the foremost state sponsor of terrorism. It counts Lebanese Hizballah an organization that has killed hundreds of Americans as among its closest allies.

Meanwhile, over at the AIPAC Policy Conference, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) reminded the audience that as I said when I voted against that deal, if Iran is to acquire a nuclear bomb, it will not have my name on it. He too sees a worsening of Irans conduct: Many of us rightly predicted that an Iranian regime that prioritized funding terrorism over the well-being of its own citizens would see sanctions relief as a cash windfall for their terrorist proxies across the region. And on terrorism, we feared that much of Irans new economic capacity would be used to propagate violence against Jews. He added, It is no surprise then that Iran has not suddenly transformed into a responsible member of the international community. Rather it remains an agent of instability throughout the Middle East, a nefarious actor that continues to undermine American national security interests and our efforts to partner with countries throughout the region working to protect civilians and build democratic governance structures.

Congressional Democrats speaking at the 2017 American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference, March 28, warned of acts of prejudice against Jewish people and people of other religions around the world. (Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post)

Given this shared assessment of Iran the JCPOA is not going away but the United States needs to confront Iran in other arenas its not surprising that a bipartisan bill,the Countering Irans Destabilizing Activities Act of 2017, with seven co-sponsors from each party, was introduced last week. These are not isolated pinpricks akin to those announced by then-national security adviser Michael Flynn after Iran launched another illegal missile test. (As the Jewish Telegraphic Agency wrote, The act establishes new sanctions targeting Irans testing of ballistic missiles and its backing for terrorism, and also seeks to block the property of any entity involved in the sale of arms to or from Iran. It does not reintroduce sanctions lifted from Iran as part of the 2015 nuclear deal.) In a summary released last week, senators described potentially far-reaching measures including mandatory sanctions on those involved with Irans ballistic missile program, new sanctions against theIslamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and a requirement for the president to block the property of any person or entity involved in specific activities related to the supply, sale, or transfer of prohibited arms and related material to or from Iran.

The administration has yet to take a position on the bill, but President Trump would be hard-pressed to come up with reasons to oppose the bill. Should he seek to trim the Senates sails either to preserve executive discretion or to avoid a clash with Russia he in all likelihood would find himself outmatched by a veto-proof majority in favor of the bill. In other words, Trump would do well to follow the bipartisan leaders on the Hill on this one. It may be the only win he chalks up anytime soon.

View post:
Iran provides a rare moment of bipartisanship - Washington Post (blog)