US seeks forfeiture of $47 million from Iranian oil sale proceeds
The United States has filed a civil forfeiture complaint seeking $47 million in proceeds from the sale of nearly one million barrels of Iranian oil, according to a 26 March filing in the US District Court for the District of Columbia.
The complaint alleges a scheme between 2022 and 2024 to facilitate the shipment, storage and sale of Iranian oil for the benefit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (‘IRGC’) or its Qods Force (‘IRGC-QF’), both of which are designated Foreign Terrorist Organisations (‘FTOs’), the Department of Justice (‘DOJ’) said.
The complaint details how facilitators allegedly used deceptive practices to disguise Iranian oil as Malaysian, ‘including by manipulating the tanker’s automatic identification system (AIS) to conceal that it onboarded the oil from a port in Iran.’ It added, ‘The facilitators presented falsified documents to the Croatian storage and port facility, claiming that the oil was Malaysian.’
They also ‘paid for storage fees associated with the oil’s storage in Croatia in US dollars, transactions that were conducted through US financial institutions that would have refused the transactions had they known they were associated with Iranian oil,’ the DOJ explained.
The complaint further alleges that the oil ‘constitutes the property of the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC), which has perpetuated a federal crime of terrorism by providing material support to the IRGC and IRGC-QF’.
‘As alleged, profits from petroleum product sales support the IRGC’s full range of malign activities, including the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery, support for terrorism, and both domestic and international human rights abuses,’ according to the DOJ’s statement.
The oil was sold in 2024, with the United States seizing $47 million in proceeds from that sale. Authorities noted that funds successfully forfeited with a connection to a state sponsor of terrorism ‘may in whole or in part be directed to the U.S. Victims of State Sponsored Terrorism Fund’.
The first confiscation of Iranian oil by the US was conducted under the first Trump administration in August 2020, when US forces seized four tankers loaded with Iranian oil bound for Venezuela, in violation of sanctions.
In 2019, the US tried unsuccessfully to use judicial cooperation agreements to take control of an Iranian oil vessel that had been detained in the British territory of Gibraltar, which released the tanker despite a plea by American authorities, following assurances by Iran that the cargo would not sail to Syria in violation of sanctions.
The sanctions on Iranian petroleum and petroleum products were first introduced in the 1980s in response to Tehran’s alleged support for terrorism and extremism. They have been increasingly tightened since then, except for a brief respite between 2016 and 2018 when Tehran was negotiating a nuclear deal with the United States and other world powers.
The US ‘maximum pressure’ policy, reinstated in 2018, aimed to cripple Iran’s economy and force compliance with stricter nuclear and regional behaviour standards. Recent statements from the Trump Administration emphasise the reinstatement of the ‘maximum pressure’ policy on Iran, with the Treasury Department saying this month it wants to ‘reduce Iran’s oil exports to zero’.
