US administration’s persistence to sell the world the idea that the final
nuclear deal will bring rulers in Iran to propriety of behavior led to a
meeting in London on May 12th in which US Secretary of State John Kerry tried
to persuade European financial institutions to facilitate business with Iran.
Mr. Kerry did not come out of the meeting as a winner. International sanctions
imposed over Tehran’s nuclear activities were lifted in January, but other U.S.
and European sanctions remained unchanged. A few days later on May 17 David
Lipton, the first IMF senior management official to visit Iran since the 1979
revolution, said in an interview in Tehran, “The best thing the government can
do, and the banks can do, is to bring those standards up to international
levels and try to reassure foreign partners, banks and otherwise that Iran’s
banks are safe to deal with”. As
Bloomberg reported Lipton advised that “Iran must bolster anti-money laundering
and terrorism-financing laws if it wants to reconnect to the global economy”.
