Iran Press/Europe: The letter came after the United States imposed sanctions on October 8 against 18 Iranian banks as part of a campaign to exert “maximum pressure” on Tehran, Reuters reported.
In their joint letter, dated October 26, diplomats from the three European nations told Washington that the sanctions could make food and medicine "prohibitively expensive" for ordinary Iranians in the middle of the pandemic.
A spokesperson with Britain's Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said the UK "does not agree with these sanctions, which affect a number of banks helping the Iranian people access vital humanitarian supplies."
France’s foreign ministry declined to comment. A French diplomatic source said the letter was part of ongoing efforts by the three countries to make clear to the U.S. administration that it would not give up on the Iran deal.
A German government official said that humanitarian channels need to remain open and that it has advocated for this.
A Bundesbank spokesman confirmed that Iranian banks held accounts with it in order to process payments but declined to comment on them individually. "The German Bundesbank is bound by national and European law, also, naturally, in relation to financial sanctions," the spokesman said.
Germany’s Bundesbank also kept a multi-billion-euro deposit facility open for Iranian banks, including two that faced fresh U.S. sanctions, giving Tehran a much-needed banking lifeline at a time its access to the global financial system was largely cut off, according to central bank data and interviews with bankers, Western diplomats and officials.
The behind-the-scenes pushback to Washington and the extent of Germany’s support to Iranian trade in the face of U.S. sanctions have not been previously reported, and shed new light on the divergent approaches to Iran taken by U.S. President Donald Trump and the U.S. allies.
The order barred Americans further from dealing with the Iranian banks and extended secondary sanctions on foreign companies that did business with those lenders. For foreign banks, violations could mean losing access to the U.S. market and raise the specter of hefty penalties, even although U.S. sanctions, legally speaking, don't apply in Europe and other jurisdictions.
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