US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has drawn European businesses into Washington’s economic campaign against Iran, naming a French refinery, a Swiss trader and a British-registered shipowner among nearly 60 targets on August 24.
The Treasury said the designations opened Operation Economic Outcast, a sustained effort to close off the regime’s remaining links to the global economy. Bessent said the aim was to “sever every economic lifeline that sustains this tyrannical regime”.
Its Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) issued determinations covering five sectors of the Iranian economy, namely digital assets, technology, gold, aviation and shipping. The move lets Washington sanction any foreign person operating in those sectors, wherever based.
Among those designated is Wellbred Trading SA, a Switzerland-based arm of a Singapore commodities group that the Treasury links to Iranian shipping magnate Mohammad Hossein Shamkhani. The firm bought the French cooking oil refinery La Nivernaise de Raffinage SAS in 2024, which OFAC said was part of an attempt to look legitimate through European alternative energy investments.
Britain-based Estanica Trading Ltd was listed as owner of the Gambia-flagged tanker TELA, said by the Treasury to have carried hundreds of thousands of barrels of Iranian crude. Greek nationals Almpertos and Georgios Tsoris were designated over refuelling services supplied to sanctioned vessels through firms in Dubai and Hong Kong.
The broker and shadow fleet network targeted operated across the United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Switzerland and Europe, according to the Treasury.
Bessent named no country facing secondary sanctions and set no public deadline, saying each would be given a defined timeline to shut down Iran-related activity. He said a major financial institution would be sanctioned before the end of the week and that China would not be exempt.
The European Union has so far kept to measures of its own, having adopted sanctions in May over Tehran’s disruption of the Strait of Hormuz and designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) a terrorist organisation in February.
Oil prices fell about 2.5 per cent on August 24 as traders judged the measures would not immediately cut physical supply. Brent stayed near a one-month high, with the strait still disrupted and European energy costs elevated since February.
Brussels has not said whether it would shield European companies, as it tried to do with its blocking statute after Washington left the 2015 nuclear deal. The practical effect is that Iranian business EU law does not itself prohibit now risks exclusion from the US financial system.
