Iran's state media boast about sanctioned maritime carrier’s success

Iran’s state media have undermined the impact of the previous sanctions on Iran's maritime carrier by suggesting that the new ones by the European Union and the United Kingdom are not important.

“Investigations show that the sanctions imposed on the maritime carrier in the past two decades have not stopped or reduced the [shipping] group’s activities and the company has been able to set unprecedented recording in shipping cargo,” the ultra-hardliner Kayhan newspaper which Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s office funds wrote Wednesday.

An article entitled “Immunity of Iran’s shipping industry to illegal sanctions” published by Press TV, the English Channel of the Islamic Republic’s state broadcaster, also claimed Wednesday that the maritime carrier has made “big leaps” in equipment and infrastructure development despite previous sanctions.

The EU and the UK imposed fresh sanctions targeting Iran's shipping and aviation industries on Monday, accusing the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines (IRISL) Group of transporting drones and military equipment for the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) to aid Russia in its war against Ukraine.

Iranian authorities vehemently deny supplying ballistic missiles to Russia and summoned the UK envoy to the foreign ministry on Tuesday, hours after summoning the Hungarian ambassador whose country is currently the rotating president of the EU, to protest.

Kayhan and Press TV have cited the shipping group’s gasoline delivery to Venezuela in May 2020, despite the US Navy threatening to seize the cargo, as one of the IRISL group’s achievements.

A few months later, however, the US said it had successfully disrupted another multimillion-dollar fuel shipment by the Revolutionary Guards bound for Venezuela and published a video of a failed Iranian attempt to recover the seized petroleum.

Iranian cargo ship destinations are now mainly limited to ports in China, Russia, India, and the United Arab Emirates. Of the forty-five major Chinese ports, Iranian ships are only allowed to use three due to the fear of problems arising from US sanctions as well as Iranian vessel’s use of polluting fuel according to some officials.

“Our shipping has been under embargo for 20 years. Our ships have not docked in European ports for the recent show embargo to affect us,” Aftab News, a news website close to former President Hassan Rouhani quoted IRISL’s secretary general Masoud Polmeh, as saying on Tuesday.

Nevertheless, Polmeh admitted that the sanctions have taken their toll on Iran's cargo shipping industry.

“I’m not saying [like some politicians] that sanctions are scraps of paper. The reality is that it has increased maritime transportation costs by up to one hundred percent in some instances,” he added.

The company was first sanctioned by the United States in 2008 for its nuclear and missile programs followed by the United Nations sanction as part of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1929 and separate EU sanctions in 2010.

The 2015 nuclear deal with world powers lifted all the sanctions imposed on IRISL but the United States reimposed its sanctions in 2018 when Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from the said deal.

The US has since then also sanctioned some Chinese companies in China, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Iran for doing business with the Iranian maritime carrier.

IRISL is a publicly traded company. It currently ranks 18 in Alphaliner's Top 100 maritime operators list. The shipping group’s fleet of 150 has a share of 0.5 percent of the total container capacity. This is down by 0.1 percent from 2022 when it stood at 14th place.