A businessman has been jailed for 41 months in the US after admitting sanctions busting by buying two LPG tankers and faking documents to move Iranian cargoes.
Naturalised American Behrouz Mokhtari, 72, pleaded guilty to working with a group of Iranians to ship petrochemical products to and from Iran for at least four years from February 2013.
In a separate conspiracy, he controlled businesses in the United Arab Emirates and Iran that were involved in refining and shipping oil products from 2018 to 2020, according to the US Department of Justice.
Mokhtari, of McLean, Virginia, set up a front company — East & West Shipping Inc — in Panama to buy two LPG tankers for $38m. The vessels were then transferred to other front companies to disguise the ownership structure.
Mokhtari and his accomplices directed a ship-management company to oversee the leasing and operations of the two vessels to move Iranian petrochemicals and engage in ship-to-ship transfers.
One of the tankers was sold for scrap for more than $3.1m in 2017 and Mokhtari banked the bulk of the proceeds, using some of it to buy a $1.5m home in Campbell, California.
As a US citizen, Mokhtari was banned from doing business with Iranian bodies without a licence from the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. Prosecutors said he never applied for one.
Mokhtari will have a further three years of supervised release after he is freed from jail. He also must forfeit nearly $2.86m as well as the house.
The US first imposed sanctions on Iran in 1979 following the seizure of the US embassy in Tehran and increasingly squeezed its economy.
Some respite came for the Iranian regime with the lifting of international sanctions under a 2015 deal aimed at limiting its nuclear programme.
But former US president Donald Trump reimposed sanctions in a campaign of “maximum pressure” on the Iranian leadership after quitting the deal in 2018.
Joe Biden — Trump’s successor in the White House — failed to revive the agreement in 2022 despite months of talks.
