News

The European Union announced this week a new round of economic sanctions targeting 100 Iranian companies, including Tehran's main European financial hub, the Hamburg-based European-Iranian trade bank (EIH).

British diplomats and nuclear proliferation experts played a key role in ratcheting up the pressure on Chancellor Angela Merkel's government to drop its resistance to blacklisting the EIH.

In March, British security experts provided evidence to the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin about EIH's questionable financial dealings.

In early April, the business daily Handelsblatt revealed that the German Foreign Ministry, through its top diplomat Guido Westerwelle, "rubber-stamped" 1.5 billion euros' worth of crude oil payments from India to Iran via the EIH.