Iran International
A bank owned by the Iranian state is still open in London, operating on a temporary permission from the British Treasury that expires on October 22. Renewing it, or letting it lapse, is Britain's answer to Washington's campaign to shut Iran's banks for good.
On Monday, August 24, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced Washington's new campaign against Iran's regime: Operation Economic Outcast. The objective, in his words, is "to sever every economic lifeline that sustains this tyrannical regime until Tehran stands alone."
More than 60 entities, individuals and vessels were designated in the first round. But among all the institutions Bessent named, one stood out: Bank Melli, one of the Iranian state's largest banks, was the only one whose every foreign branch, he said, "must be shuttered and dark."
Bessent also issued a warning to anyone tempted to help: "Any entity that facilitates money laundering on behalf of Iran will be removed from the U.S. dollar system. The clock just started ticking."
Britain has made a narrower accusation. It designated Bank Melli's London subsidiary under its Iran nuclear sanctions regime, and nothing in the bank's UK filings alleges money laundering. Two governments reached the same bank by different legal routes.
Eleven months after Britain sanctioned it, Melli Bank plc still holds a British banking license. It still seats a board, still meets a payroll in London, still files audited accounts. Every asset frozen, every new customer barred, and it remains a bank. Shuttering it is a separate act, and Britain is the only government that can perform it.
A British bank, owned by the Islamic Republic
Bank Melli operates branches and subsidiaries in about ten countries and territories, from the United Arab Emirates to Germany. Its London operation is a company in its own right: Melli Bank plc is registered in England, with a full banking license from Britain's financial regulators, the same authorities that supervise Barclays and HSBC.
Every share of it belongs to Bank Melli Iran, which belongs to the Iranian state. Until April 2026, the chairman of its London board was simultaneously the chief executive of the parent bank in Tehran.
Being a British company comes with a British obligation: publishing audited financial statements for anyone to read. The latest set, 54 pages covering 2025, was filed with the UK corporate registry in June. It amounts to something rare: an inside view of a regime-owned bank as the walls close in.
The accounts also leave no doubt about what the bank was for. Its core business for four decades was financing trade between Iran and Europe, mainly through letters of credit, the standard instrument that guarantees payment in cross-border trade.
The bank's own filings call Iran its "niche market" and say about 92% of its revenue was earned in euros, in what it calls the Eurozone–Iran trade corridor. A €363 million institution, with €258.8 million in capital that ultimately belongs to the Iranian state, existed inside the British financial system to keep money flowing between Iran and Europe.
And business was good, right up to the end. In 2024 the bank recorded its best profit since 2014, €2.4 million. In 2025 its fee income from trade finance surged another 71%, a boom cut short in late September, when the sanctions arrived.
What a severed lifeline looks like
In August 2025, Britain, France and Germany triggered the UN "snapback." The restored sanctions took effect on September 28. The next day, Britain and the European Union sanctioned Melli Bank plc itself.
Since then, the bank has been forbidden from writing a new loan or taking a new customer. Its own accounts describe what remains as the "orderly management" of existing assets and liabilities in a controlled, non-trading environment.
The numbers show what that means in practice:
The bank's British auditor has formally warned of "material uncertainty" over whether it can continue as a going concern. Its Hong Kong staff left in January when a payment license for their salaries failed to arrive in time. Layoffs began in London in December.
The Tehran representative office is closing. Four board members have departed in little over a year; three remain. Yet seniority still pays: total board compensation rose to €905,000 in 2025, and the highest-paid director received a €615,000 package including rented housing, a company car and private health insurance, in the same year the bank booked €1.26 million in severance costs.
What keeps the lights on at all is a permission slip. A general license from the UK Treasury, issued three and a half weeks after the designation, allows exactly four kinds of payments: wages and severance for its UK-based staff and directors, their pensions, IT bills, and the accountant's fee.
Every month the bank must report every payment it makes, line by line, to the Treasury. Even its lawyers require a separate license; legal and professional costs jumped 57% last year to just over €1 million, more than five times the bank's entire 2025 profit of €181,000, itself down 92% from the year before.
Britain's decision
On August 25, the day after Bessent spoke, Britain's Chancellor John Healey welcomed Operation Economic Outcast, noting that Britain has imposed more than 240 sanctions on Iran since Labour took office in 2024 and pledging to work with Washington on economic pressure.
Britain had sanctioned Melli Bank plc eleven months earlier on grounds of its own, under a nuclear regime unrelated to the money laundering Bessent alleges. The endorsement answers a different question: on the objective, Britain is with Washington.
That question has been open since the war began, with American officials making little secret of their view that British cooperation has run behind Washington's expectations. Melli Bank plc offers a cheap way to close the gap. The bank has been barred from trading since September. Its depositors are overwhelmingly sanctioned Iranian institutions. Its staff is already leaving. Letting the license expire hands Washington a closed bank at almost no cost to Britain.
Britain sanctioned the bank in September 2025, and weeks later the Treasury granted it Interim Necessities General Licence INT/2025/7628424. Renewal followed in April 2026. Every British and European sanction on Melli Bank plc that is in force today was in force then. Washington announced Operation Economic Outcast four months later, on August 24. The license expires on October 22.
The bank expected the signature to come again. Citing legal advice, its accounts say it anticipated renewal, and it behaved accordingly: it had added a new board member weeks before snapback, signed a new Hong Kong office lease a month after being sanctioned, and planned to rehire staff there by this summer.
Its report contains no wind-down plan, no closure scenario, and not a word about what happens to the €98 million in deposits or the €258.8 million in capital if the license lapses.
If the license lapses, the bank cannot lawfully pay its staff or its auditors, and an English company that cannot pay its auditors does not remain a going concern. Insolvency would put Melli Bank plc in front of a British court, which would have to decide what becomes of €98 million owed mostly to sanctioned Iranian banks and €258.8 million of capital belonging to the Iranian state.
Neither the bank nor the Treasury has said what that process would look like. The difficulty of it is the best reason the Treasury has to sign again. Insolvency would release nothing, though: sanctioned money stays frozen whoever administers it.
A freeze is a pause, and this bank has lived through one. The European Union sanctioned Melli Bank plc in 2008. The nuclear agreement lifted those sanctions in 2016, and the bank went back to financing Iranian trade, on its way to its best year since 2014. Everything imposed on it since 2025 could come off the same way, in a deal. Closure ends that.
A surrendered license, distributed capital and a dispersed staff leave nothing to restart, and any future British government minded to have this bank back would have to authorize an Iranian state-owned bank from the beginning.
That is what makes this obscure bank in London worth watching. Operation Economic Outcast rests on a claim that a regime's financial lifelines can be cut in practice. Melli Bank plc shows the machinery running end to end: international snapback, allied designations, a frozen balance sheet, a departing staff, and one administrative decision standing between a regime-owned bank and closure.
On October 22 the Treasury has two options. It can sign the license again and keep Melli Bank plc alive, or let it lapse and close a British bank owned by the Iranian state. Bessent said the clock just started ticking. In London, it already has an alarm set.
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This report is based on Melli Bank plc's Annual Report and Financial Statements for 2025 and prior years, filed at the UK's Companies House (company no. 04152338); the Companies House register of directors; the UK Sanctions List entry for Melli Bank plc under the Iran (Sanctions) (Nuclear) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019; the UK Treasury's Interim Necessities General Licence INT/2025/7628424 and its Legal Services General Licence INT/2025/7323088, both published on gov.uk; Council Decision 2008/475/EC, which first listed the bank in the European Union, and the delistings of January 2016 under the nuclear agreement; Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's remarks of August 24, 2026, announcing Operation Economic Outcast; the UK Chancellor's statement of August 25, 2026; and Iranian press reporting on the removal of Abolfazl Najarzadeh as chief executive of Bank Melli Iran.
The format barely varies. A person holds up what they bought and names what it cost. Four eggs and a single sausage, 5 million rials, about $2.30. A soda and a packet of crisps, 3.5 million rials. Three small bags of shopping, 75 million rials, roughly $34, which is close to half a month at Iran's minimum wage of about $75. Then the line, in one version or another: I am very happy, because if I were not, they would execute me. And then they dance.
One man films his phone showing a bank balance of 2 million rials, under a dollar, and dances through the list of what it will not cover: the bounced cheques, the unpaid shop rent, the apartment rent, his wife's clothes.
A veiled woman holds up a few tomatoes, onions and potatoes and explains that she can no longer buy by the kilo, only a handful at a time, "but I am happy, because otherwise they call me a rioter or a traitor." She thanks the authorities and signs off warmly. Another woman does the same with six eggs and a tin of tuna.
Another man dances while captions scroll over him: the dollar at 200,000 tomans, no electricity, deep in debt, and a signed undertaking to the authorities not to engage in politics. The threat varies with the week's official vocabulary: some dancers say they would otherwise be branded a mercenary, a traitor, or a Mossad agent.
It reads, at first, as one more instance of a familiar thing, humor as a pressure valve under repression. That reading is not wrong, but it is not what is new here, and it misses what the videos are actually doing.
The Islamic Republic has a specific charge for describing the country's problems: siah-namai, "painting things black." It is used against journalists, economists and ordinary complainers to mean the deliberate darkening of a reality that is, officials insist, fine. The dance videos answer it precisely. They paint things white, so luridly that the whiteness itself becomes the accusation.
A man delighted by four eggs is not praising the government. He is holding its own demand up to the light.
To see why this is a break rather than a joke, it helps to recall Vaclav Havel's greengrocer, the shopkeeper in communist Czechoslovakia who puts the slogan "Workers of the world, unite!" in his window. He does not believe it. What the sign really says, Havel wrote, is: I am obedient and therefore have the right to be left in peace. The system did not need people to believe. It needed each of them to see everyone else pretending, so that pretending felt like the only choice. Its one requirement was silence about what the pretending was for.
The Iranian dancer is Havel's greengrocer saying the quiet part aloud while still holding up the sign. The compliance is performed, the smile is wide, the gratitude is offered. And in the same breath the coercion behind it is named: I am doing this because the alternative is a noose.
Coerced performance works only while the coercion stays deniable. Havel's greengrocer kept the system standing by leaving the reason unsaid. The dancer says the reason into the camera, and the sign in the window stops working.
Follow that to its end and the videos are doing something sharper than mockery. They are exposing a problem the state has made for itself.
When a government criminalizes complaint, it also empties praise of meaning. If unhappiness can be prosecuted, a happy citizen and a frightened one become impossible to tell apart.
The dancers are demonstrating this to the state's face: you can no longer know whether we are content, because you have made discontent a crime, and so our contentment tells you nothing.
This is the deeper significance of a format built entirely from the state's own words. Every accusation the dancers voice, siah-namai, rioter, mercenary, Mossad agent, traitor, is lifted from official language. The videos are assembled from nothing but the vocabulary the government uses to police speech, and turned into an instrument of it.
Linguists distinguish the message from the metamessage: what a statement says, and what it conveys about the relationship between the people speaking. Every one of these videos carries the same metamessage. I cannot tell you the truth, you know I cannot, and I know that you know.
The gap between "I am delighted" and "I am forbidden to say otherwise" is the entire content. Iranians read it without effort. The state pretends to read only the surface.
The videos are the latest move in a shift that has been accelerating, and each stage has done something different to the relationship between a sign and its meaning.
During the January protests, demonstrators in the western town of Abdanan scattered rice into the air, pouring away a staple that had grown scarce and dear. The gesture refused the frame the state wanted to impose on the unrest.
By throwing away the very thing they could barely afford, protesters were saying the anger was never really about the price of rice. The economy had triggered something larger: a rejection of the whole arrangement.
Then came the funerals. After the January massacre, families burying the dead replaced the state's mourning language, the Quranic recitation, the lamentation, the word shahid, "martyr," with another vocabulary entirely: wedding music, folk dance, verses from the Shahnameh, and a new word for their dead, javid-nam, "whose name will endure."
That was an act of authorship. The grief was real, and out of it people built a rival ritual language, deliberately cleansed of the religious symbolism the state relies on.
The price videos are the third move, and they are not the same as the funeral dances, even though both use the body and both use music. The funeral dance builds; it replaces the state's grammar with a sincere one of its own. The price video hollows; it takes the state's grammar and performs it as a corpse. One is about the dead and constructs a new language. The other is about the living and empties an existing one. A society that first refused the state's frame, and then authored its own, is now wearing the state's words as a mask.
It is worth remembering how far this has travelled. Dance is not merely frowned upon in Iran; it is effectively illegal, and the word itself is so freighted that the state, when staging its own approved versions, avoids it and reaches instead for the bloodless euphemism harakat-e mozoun, "rhythmic movements," a coinage that was itself widely mocked when it appeared.
During the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom protests, teenage girls were detained and pushed into filmed confessions for dancing in a Tehran neighborhood. The same act now circulates in its hundreds, filmed openly by people using their own names and faces, among them veiled women from households where dancing would once have been unthinkable on its own terms, never mind the law's. That is its own measure of how fast the ground is moving.
The trigger, as ever, is money. The rial has been setting records, passing 2,200,000 to the dollar, and on August 31 the judiciary chief Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei called protesters "mercenaries" and promised a firmer hand. But the videos are not really about eggs, any more than the rice was about rice.
They are about a population that has run out of permitted ways to say no, and has started saying yes in a way that unmistakably means it.
The phenomenon has acquired a name, taken from the line the dancers keep repeating: "If I'm not happy, they'll execute me." It is a joke a foreign viewer can laugh at and an Iranian cannot, quite. The Islamic Republic built a machine designed to hear only yes. It is now discovering that yes is what no has learned to sound like.
Shortages of foreign currency and raw materials, unpaid insurance debts, difficulties transferring money, disrupted imports and rising production costs have increased concerns about the pharmaceutical supply chain, the Iranian news outlet Rouydad24 reported.
“The alternative routes for supplying raw materials and imports are time-consuming and can increase drug costs by up to three times,” Hadi Ahmadi, spokesman for the Iranian Pharmacists Association, told the outlet.
Shortages of raw materials, Ahmadi said, were hindering domestic pharmaceutical production at the same time that imports were facing disruption.
Rouydad24 described the problem as extending across the pharmaceutical supply chain rather than being confined to individual medicines or pharmacies, leaving patients to absorb higher costs.
Iranian citizens have also told Iran International in recent months that medicine shortages and rising prices have disrupted treatment for many patients. Some said difficulties obtaining conventional medicines had prompted people to turn to traditional medicine.
Domestic production depends on imports
About 99% of medicines by volume are produced domestically, but imports account for roughly 13.86% of the market by value, according to figures cited by the website.
The disparity reflects the pharmaceutical industry's dependence on imported raw materials, equipment and specialized products even when finished medicines are manufactured inside Iran.
Disruptions to foreign-currency transfers or shipments of raw materials can therefore affect factories before shortages become visible in pharmacies weeks or months later.
Iran's Food and Drug Administration has said raw materials and medicines are being moved through alternative routes because wartime conditions have disrupted transportation.
Those routes take longer and cost more, Ahmadi said.
Economic pressures have also changed how some Iranians pay for healthcare. Eghtesad News reported in July that installment payments had increasingly spread through the health sector, including for dental treatment and medicines.
Not enough currency
Iran's pharmaceutical sector requires about $2.2 billion in foreign currency for medicines and raw materials this year, but only around half of that amount has been supplied, Ahmadi said.
Changes to Iran's subsidized foreign-exchange system have added another source of pressure on medicine prices.
The Food and Drug Administration has said a complete removal of subsidized currency for medicines is not planned this year, although the allocation has been reduced for some products, including insulin.
The agency said the changes did not amount to ending subsidized currency for all medicines or necessarily signal a new wave of price increases.
Ahmadi offered a different assessment of the impact on medicines affected by the changes, saying the removal of subsidized currency for some pharmaceutical groups had pushed the cost of their raw materials up more than fivefold within several months.
Iran International reported in July that patients' out-of-pocket costs for insulin had risen more than 24-fold over about 50 days.
Higher prices fuel informal drug market
Shortages are only part of the pressure facing patients because medicines that remain available may become financially inaccessible as prices rise, Rouydad24 reported.
“If medicine is available on the market but its price increases several times over, for a patient who needs medication every month and permanently, the price increase can effectively be just as problematic as a shortage,” Rouydad24 wrote.
“If insurance cannot increase its contribution in line with price rises, part of the cost will be paid out of the patient’s pocket.”
The combination of shortages, rising prices and inadequate insurance coverage places particular pressure on people with chronic illnesses, older patients and those who depend on expensive or imported medicines, the outlet added.
While two of those players are building new lives in Australia, thousands of kilometers from their families, having received citizenship there, the Islamic Republic's football federation has summoned their former teammates to record the state's account of the same events.
Farideh Shojaei, the federation's vice-president for women's football, has confirmed that a documentary about Iran's participation in the AFC Women's Asian Cup will be filmed at the camp. She described the purpose as completing the tournament archive and setting down part of the history of Iranian women's football.
The outlet Football 360 had reported earlier that the project belongs to a body outside football, and that most of the players who returned from Australia have no wish to sit in front of the federation's camera and recount what happened on that trip.
A camp that does not add up
The camp has pushed back the start of Iran's women's premier league by a week, and the federation's explanations for holding it have not been consistent.
According to Iranian media, when club coaches objected to the timing, Shojaei assured them the players would not be put under any football training load, because the point of the camp was to film the documentary. Later, explaining why a camp was being held outside a FIFA international window with no fixture ahead of the national team, she said it had been convened at the request of Marzieh Jafari, the national coach, to prepare the players.
Jafari does not currently hold an active contract with the federation. She is head coach of Khatoon Bam, the club that supplies the core of the national squad, which has just come through Asian Champions League qualifying and now needs to prepare for a new league season.
So a camp that has forced clubs to rearrange their calendars is attributed to a coach with no active federation contract, and was described to the objecting coaches as not being about training at all.
The version the state told first
The documentary is being made several months after Iranian officials gave their own account of what happened in Australia.
In the team's final days there, federation president Mehdi Taj claimed Australian police had separated the women from the men in the delegation and pressured the players into staying and claiming asylum. Esmail Baghaei, the foreign ministry spokesman, went further on television, accusing the Australian government of "taking members of the team hostage."
While those claims were being made in public, according to one club executive, money was being raised inside Iranian football to encourage the players to come home.
Alireza Babaei, chief executive of Chadormalou Ardakan, told a Football 360 live program that while the federation was working to bring the whole delegation back, its general secretary Hedayat Mombeini asked Chadormalou to pay 30 billion rials, about $15,000, for the women's national team. Chadormalou does not have a women's team.
According to Babaei, Mombeini also mentioned a payment of 50 billion rials, roughly $25,000, from the Gol Gohar club, and named Sepahan of Isfahan, a club that at that moment was weighing whether to continue fielding teams at all because of war damage to the steel industry.
In Iranian women's football, 50 billion rials from a single club is not a sum to be waved away. Afsaneh Chatrenoor, the national team forward who plays for Gol Gohar, was the premier league's leading scorer last season. She is also the player who sat across from Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei a few months ago and asked the head of the judiciary to help her find work for when her football career ends. At the top level of the Iranian women's game, the contracts of prominent players are still measured in a few billion rials.
What the tournament was always about
For the Islamic Republic's officials, the Women's Asian Cup in Australia was never only a football tournament.
Several members of the delegation applied for humanitarian protection from the Australian government during the war and after the killing of Ali Khamenei. Some later abandoned their asylum applications and returned to Iran under pressure from security forces on their families.
In those same days, Iranian officials were assembling their own version of events. They spoke of hostage-taking and of players being deceived, while simultaneously turning to threats, intimidation and financial inducements to get the asylum seekers back.
Now some of the same players who returned after that pressure are to sit in front of a camera, in a project belonging to a body outside football, and describe those days again.
It looks less like archiving history than like producing a state edition of it.
This time the Islamic Republic is not only constructing its own account of Australia. It wants the players inside the rewriting.
