Iran's Foreign Currency Problem
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 27 April 2018
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
With US President Donald Trump threatening to impose more sanctions, Iran remains frozen out of much the international financial system despite the 2015 nuclear weapons deal.
Ed Butler speaks to a British businessman who has plenty of would-be Iranian buyers of his oil equipment, but who cannot get paid into his UK bank account. Sanctions lawyer Nigel Kushner explains why most international banks still steer clear of Iran, despite the lifting of sanctions, plus Ellie Geranmayeh of think-tank the European Council on Foreign Relations explains the latest diplomatic rumblings.
(Picture: Iranian rial banknotes, alongside US one dollar bills; Credit: Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Ed Butler and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:08.5 | Coming up, what's next for Iran? |
| 0:11.6 | As the clock counts down on a US deadline for potentially scrapping the nuclear deal, |
| 0:17.4 | the country's economy is wobbling. |
| 0:19.2 | We've seen Iran's currency fluctuate, |
| 0:22.1 | and we've seen protests from the Iranian people |
| 0:25.0 | who had expected far more dividends from the nuclear agreement |
| 0:28.6 | than they've had so far. |
| 0:30.1 | And in the opaque world of US financial rules, |
| 0:33.4 | it's not just Iranian businesses that are suffering. |
| 0:36.5 | There is no law been passed in the UK Parliament, |
| 0:38.5 | forbidding any of the things that I want to do. |
| 0:40.1 | But there's a bigger bullying in the playground, which is the American government. |
| 0:43.0 | They have been over here and they've threatened the banks, |
| 0:45.0 | and they've threatened and fined UK businesses like myself. |
| 0:48.1 | Nuclear deals, sanctions, and what it all means for ordinary firms, |
| 0:51.8 | Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:55.6 | We have been hearing a lot in the last couple of weeks about Iran, specifically the Iran nuclear |
| 1:01.7 | deal, the JCPOA, to give it its handy acronym. It was designed in 2016 to stop Iran enriching |
| 1:09.6 | uranium, to build a bomb. |
| 1:11.9 | And it was hailed at the time as historic by the Barack Obama administration in the U.S. |
| 1:17.4 | The new White House incumbent isn't quite so keen, though. |
... |
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