The U.S. Department of Justice filed a civil forfeiture complaint after seizing $47 million in funds from the sale of almost 1 million barrels of Iranian oil, the department announced Wednesday.

The complaint alleges that, between 2022 and 2024, facilitators concocted a scheme to ship, store and sell Iranian oil that would benefit the Iranian Regime and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps by using “deceptive practices to masquerade the Iranian oil as Malaysian.” Facilitators manipulated the ship’s automatic identification system to hide the fact it onboarded oil from an Iranian port and “presented falsified documents to the Croatian storage and port facility.”

“We will aggressively enforce U.S. sanctions against Iran in furtherance of President Trump’s maximum pressure campaign,” said Edward Martin, interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. “With the continued seizures of Iranian oil and U.S. dollar profits, we are sending a clear message to Iran that bypassing the sanctions put in place by the U.S. Government is not as easy as playing a shell game with tankers filled with oil.”

The facilitators used U.S. currency for storage fees by going through U.S. financial institutions, which would have “refused the transactions had they known they were associated with Iranian oil.”

“The FBI will not allow hostile regimes to evade U.S. sanctions or exploit our financial systems to fund designated terrorist organizations,” said Alvin Winston, FBI special agent in charge. “The FBI, alongside our partners, will relentlessly enforce U.S. sanctions against Iran and safeguard U.S. national security by disrupting illicit networks that seek to profit from sanctioned oil sales.”

Image - Reuters