The United States imposed fresh sanctions targeting Iran’s financial networks Friday even as US officials said progress had been made toward a deal with Tehran over the Strait of Hormuz and it could be clinched as early as the weekend.
The US Treasury targeted currency exchange houses, shell companies and financial facilitators that Washington said helped Iran move hundreds of millions of dollars through the international financial system.
The State Department said the measures targeted networks Iran used to access oil revenue, evade sanctions and move funds through front companies.
It added that the new sanctions were intended “to cut the financial lifelines that sustain Iran’s ruling elite.”
The statement said Washington would continue targeting banks, exchange houses and other facilitators it says Iran uses to move funds and evade sanctions.
Despite the new sanctions, US officials insist that progress has been made in talks over the Strait of Hormuz.
There has been progress between Oman and Iran over the strait and a deal is expected soon, Reuters reported Friday, citing a US official.
The official said the US would lift its blockade of Iranian ports once an agreement was announced to restore commercial shipping through the strait without impediments.
Bessent says ceasefire could come soon
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent separately said a 30- to 60-day ceasefire agreement with Iran could come “shortly, maybe even today, tomorrow,” adding that a deal could reopen the Strait of Hormuz and bring energy prices down.
Bessent also said the strait would “never” return to the way it was, saying Iran had used or tried to use it as a choke point.
“What we are going to see over the next two years, the strait is going to become irrelevant. It is going to become just another body of water,” Bessent said.
He added that “more than 50 or 70%” of the energy currently moving through the strait would instead go through underground pipelines.
Earlier Oman proposal
The latest progress follows weeks of talks between Iran and Oman over a new arrangement for commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran had earlier rejected an Omani proposal for a 50-50 arrangement dividing the inbound and outbound routes between the two sides, saying it did not sufficiently address Tehran’s security concerns.
Tehran instead proposed that one shipping lane run entirely through Iranian territorial waters and part of the other also pass through Iranian waters, allowing Iran to maintain oversight over traffic in both directions.
US actions would remain performance-based and tied to Iran’s implementation of its commitments, the US official told Reuters.
The action by Bank of Industry and Mine (BIM) comes despite domestic statutory provisions extending NIOC’s debt repayment deadlines through the end of the current Iranian fiscal year in March 2027, Fars reported, without giving the size of the debt or saying when the accounts were frozen.
The bank is a government-owned lender that mainly finances industrial and mining projects.
The apparent mismatch between the repayment timetable and the freezing of the accounts was not explained by Fars.
NIOC, overseen by Iran's Ministry of Petroleum, sits at the center of the country's energy industry, managing much of its oil exploration, production and exports and providing a major source of revenue.
Later on Wednesday, an NIOC financial official told the Tasnim news agency that the company had been in a dispute with Iran's tax authorities over electronic reporting requirements.
Morteza Rouhi, a tax official in NIOC's financial management division, said state-budgeted companies such as NIOC hold some information they are not permitted to disclose, including details related to oil exports, while tax rules require companies to register sales and transactions electronically.
“The oil and economy ministers held a meeting, after which the president’s legal office intervened and ordered a halt to enforcement. We now have no concerns about the National Iranian Oil Company’s accounts being frozen,” Rouhi said.
Sanctions and domestic pressure
Fars said the accounts were frozen over debt but also pointed in the same report to financial restrictions previously imposed on NIOC by the US Treasury. The bank itself was sanctioned in 2018.
The reference is notable because Washington's restrictions on NIOC have themselves been tied to the company's relationship with the Revolutionary Guards.
The US Treasury determined in 2012 that NIOC was an agent or affiliate of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and in 2020 designated the company under counterterrorism authorities over what it said was NIOC's support for the IRGC's Quds Force.
NIOC is nevertheless formally overseen by Iran's Ministry of Petroleum and sits at the heart of the state economy, managing much of the country's oil production and exports.
The account freeze therefore puts a domestic financial restriction on a government-controlled company whose international financial finances have been affected by its links to the IRGC, as described by the US Treasury.
Fault lines in Tehran
The action also comes as the war and negotiations with Washington have made divisions among Iran's centers of power increasingly public.
Those divisions do not fall neatly between the government and the IRGC. President Masoud Pezeshkian and officials involved in diplomacy, including Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, have faced pressure from hardline lawmakers, media and political groups opposed to concessions to Washington.
Ghalibaf, himself a former senior IRGC commander, has faced criticism from ultra-hardliners over his role in negotiations. Lawmakers have also stepped up pressure on Araghchi to disclose details of the US talks, with one senior lawmaker saying this week that parliamentarians were gathering material for a possible impeachment effort against the foreign minister.
The divisions have also surfaced among pro-government supporters mobilized on the streets during the war, a constituency sometimes referred to as the "meydan," or field.
Ghalibaf has emphasized the authorities' role in that mobilization, saying officials called supporters onto the streets after news of former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's death because they feared the situation could otherwise take a “different turn”.
Some of those gatherings later became platforms for opposition to negotiations and criticism of Ghalibaf, Araghchi and other officials involved in talks with Washington, turning a show of establishment support into another source of pressure over diplomacy.
Araghchi has suggested that foreign intelligence operations could exploit such internal vulnerabilities.
In a recent interview, he said they could seek not only to gather information but also to influence Iran's decision-making and shape its psychological environment and public perceptions.
The NIOC account freeze has not been linked to those political disputes. But it comes as the strains of war, US sanctions and renewed diplomacy increasingly expose tensions among the government, security establishment and other centers of power within the Islamic Republic.
