Iran International
Canada’s Federal Court has ordered the government to decide within 60 days on a visitor visa application from a former project manager at Iran’s Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant after the case remained in security screening for more than 900 days.
Naser Mansoursharifloo, an Iranian citizen, applied for the visa in January 2024. About six weeks later, government records marked his case as “approved pending info from partners,” but no final decision followed for more than two years.
By the time the case reached a court hearing in August, the application had spent about 911 days in security screening, far longer than government processing estimates for Iranian visitor visas during the period.
Mansoursharifloo holds a doctorate in mechanical engineering and previously worked as a project manager at the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant. He also served as head of engineering at Islamic Azad University in central Tehran, according to the court.
The court said the government had not provided enough evidence to explain why the screening had taken so long. It ordered authorities to make a decision within 60 days of the September 1 ruling.
The order does not require Canada to approve Mansoursharifloo’s visa and the court did not find that he was inadmissible. It only requires the government to make a decision.
Canada steps up action against Iranian officials
The case comes amid a broader push by Canada to keep out or remove former senior officials of the Islamic Republic, particularly people whose past government roles could make them inadmissible under Canadian law.
Ottawa moved in 2022 to bar senior Iranian government officials from entering or remaining in Canada after the Islamic Republic’s crackdown on nationwide anti-establishment protests.
Canada has since pursued a number of cases involving former Iranian officials already in the country, while immigration authorities have increased scrutiny of applicants with backgrounds in Iranian government institutions.
Canada also listed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist entity in 2024, adding another layer to its increasingly confrontational approach toward people and institutions tied to the Islamic Republic.
Former officials face deportation cases
In one recent case, Canadian authorities are seeking to deport Abbas Omidi, a former senior official in Iran’s Ministry of Industry, Mines and Trade who lives in Toronto.
Canadian government documents reported by Global News said Omidi had played a significant role in Iran’s mining sector and that revenue generated by the sector helped support the Iranian government, its military and the IRGC.
Omidi acknowledged during his deportation proceedings that he had served as a deputy director general in the ministry but said his position was mainly technical.
The Canada Border Services Agency is seeking his removal on the grounds that he served as a senior Iranian government official.
Canada has also pursued other former officials under measures introduced after 2022, including people connected to Iranian state institutions and security bodies.
Sequences of Copernicus satellite images comparing the months before the war with the period under the blockade show a striking change at both ports.
At Shahid Rajaee near Bandar Abbas, pre-war images show vessels occupying multiple berths and denser use of the container terminal, while later images show far fewer ships and large sections of the port appearing largely inactive.
Copernicus satellite images from January 2, 2026 and September 4, 2026 show Shahid Rajaee Port near Bandar Abbas before the war and during the US blockade, with far fewer vessels visible at its berths in the later image.
Shahid Rajaee is Iran’s most important export port and, after Imam Khomeini Port, its second-largest gateway for imports. It is also the country’s largest container port, handling nearly 80% of Iran’s container loading and unloading, according to official figures.
A similar pattern is visible at Imam Khomeini Port in southwestern Iran, the country’s largest import gateway, where satellite imagery shows markedly reduced vessel presence and terminal activity compared with the period before the conflict.
Copernicus satellite images from February 25, 2026 and September 5, 2026 show Imam Khomeini Port in southwestern Iran before the war and during the US blockade, with a marked decline in visible vessel and terminal activity.
The images provide a visual measure of the disruption at ports that are critical to Iran’s economy. Shahid Rajaee handles more than 55% of Iran’s imports and exports and an estimated 85% to 90% of its container trade, according to Iranian port data.
Imam Khomeini Port plays a particularly important role in imports of food and other basic commodities. Iran’s Ports and Maritime Organization said the port handled more than 48 million tons of cargo in the year ending March 2025, including 19.2 million tons of imported goods.
The satellite evidence reinforces other indications that the blockade is increasingly biting. Video published from Shahid Rajaee in late August showed no ships docked and little apparent loading or unloading activity.
Iran International reported in July that activity at the port had been reduced to a minimum, with thousands of containers stranded and about half of its workforce laid off.
Iranian officials have also increasingly acknowledged the economic impact. President Masoud Pezeshkian said in late August that blocked routes were preventing goods, including gasoline, from entering the country.
Reuters reported this week that Iranian trade had fallen by as much as 35% amid the blockade and intensified sanctions, while gasoline supplies had tightened sharply.
The effect has been even more pronounced on Iran’s oil trade. Iranian crude loadings fell from around 2 million barrels per day before the war to roughly 220,000–255,000 bpd in August, according to shipping data cited by Reuters.
Washington says the blockade can be sustained indefinitely. As of Aug. 23, US Central Command said its forces had redirected 70 commercial vessels attempting to breach it, while three had been disabled and two boarded.
Iran’s foreign trade has contracted sharply since the conflict with the United States began, with non-oil exports and imports falling by around a quarter or more, according to customs data released after months of delay.
Iran exported about $15 billion worth of non-oil goods, including natural gas and LPG, through August 16, nearly five months into the Iranian calendar year that began on March 21. That was nearly 30% below the figure reported for the first five months of the previous year.
Imports fell to about $17 billion over the same near-five-month period, about a quarter below the full five-month figure reported a year earlier.
The figures show a sharp deterioration in Iran’s trade during a conflict that has disrupted key industries and shipping routes, adding to an economy already struggling under years of sanctions, declining oil revenues and chronic shortages of foreign currency.
A mountain in the Zagros range in Isfahan province, about 1.5 kilometers south of the Natanz enrichment complex, with a large facility dug into it.
The name is a small accident of translation. The mountain is called Kuh-e Kolang Gaz La, and kolang means pickaxe, so foreign analysts began calling the site Pickaxe Mountain. It is not what Iranians call the facility, and Iran has never given it a public name at all.
Because of the rock. Most of the surrounding range is sedimentary, but this mountain is hard, dense granite, which gives anything tunneled beneath it substantial natural protection.
Construction began in the autumn of 2020, months after an explosion destroyed an above-ground advanced centrifuge assembly plant at Natanz in an attack widely attributed to Israel. Iran said at the time that the underground halls would replace it.
The destroyed plant had been built to assemble roughly 6,000 advanced centrifuges a year, a capacity sized for the tens of thousands Iran expected to need as restrictions under the 2015 nuclear deal expired between 2025 and 2030.
Nobody outside Iran knows, which is the heart of the problem.
The International Atomic Energy Agency has never been given access. A double security perimeter, a fence and a wall with a patrol route, rings the entire mountain and joins Natanz's own perimeter. There are two pairs of tunnel entrances, one on the east side and one on the west. Analysts assume they lead to a single facility, but even that is not certain.
Iran has said the site is for producing and assembling advanced centrifuges. The Institute for Science and International Security, which has tracked the construction by satellite for years, judges the space beneath the mountain large enough to hold considerably more: not only an assembly plant but a working enrichment plant capable of producing weapons-grade uranium, and probably enough room for weaponization work such as casting uranium metal and shaping it into weapon components.
Two further claims circulate, neither verified. One is that part of Iran's stockpile of uranium enriched to 60 percent, estimated by the IAEA at around 440 kilograms, has been moved there.
The other, from an Israeli intelligence assessment reported by the Wall Street Journal, is that thousands of centrifuges were moved into the mountain last autumn. Neither Israel nor the United States has published evidence.
The institute's reading of the imagery is that the facility is not yet operational, and that construction continues.
At least 100 meters beneath the mountain, which stands 1,608 meters above sea level.
There is a detail in those measurements worth noticing. The eastern entrances sit about 145 meters below the ridge; the western entrances about 100 meters. That 50-metre difference between the two sets of doors suggests the facility may have more than one level.
Either way it is deeper than Fordow or Natanz, both of which the United States has bombed.
Not the mountain itself. The GBU-57, the largest conventional bunker-buster in the US arsenal, weighs about 13,000 kilograms and is reported to penetrate 18 meters of concrete or 61 meters of earth. Against 100 meters of granite, experts are skeptical.
But a buried facility still has to breathe, and that is where the vulnerability lies. Any working complex needs power, ventilation, heating and cooling, deliveries and people going in and out, and each of those connections surfaces somewhere.
There is a precedent for exactly this. Schematics have been published for two other Iranian tunnel sites built by the Amad nuclear weapons program, Fordow and Shahid Boroujerdi. Both showed ventilation shafts, and in both cases those shafts were directly targeted in air strikes, in June 2025 and March 2026 respectively, because they offered penetrating weapons a way further inside.
No schematics for Pickaxe Mountain have surfaced publicly, but a probable ventilation shaft near the eastern entrances was seen under construction in 2024, fed by a power line that runs above ground before disappearing underground.
The institute's assessment is that an attack would most likely aim at the power supply, the ventilation shafts and the open tunnel mouths, and it notes that as of imagery from July 9 the western pair of entrances remained open.
It also notes that hitting the hardened portals alone would probably deny Iran access only temporarily, adding the mountain to the list of sites that then have to be watched for attempts to dig back in.
Air defenses are not seen as an obstacle. Israel overcame them at Natanz in the opening hours of the June 2025 war.
There is a second possibility, and it has history behind it.
The institute judges that the site, as it now stands, would be more suitable for attack or sabotage by ground forces than from the air. Its model is the 2020 destruction of the Natanz assembly plant, which reportedly involved explosives brought into the building during its construction.
Pickaxe Mountain is still under construction.
That there is nothing there to bomb. Foreign ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei said in July that "no nuclear activity is taking place" at the site and called the American threats "a fabricated pretext for aggression, destruction, and sabotage."
Others have been less restrained. Mehdi Mohammadi, an adviser to the parliament speaker, called Pickaxe Mountain "the most heavily fortified nuclear facility in the world" and said a strike would "turn the region into hell."
Iran's joint military command has warned that any attack on nuclear or sensitive sites would widen the war.
July 13. On the Hugh Hewitt show: "We have eyes on it and Pickaxe mountain is a possible target for a nice big fat shot right in the front door. We're watching Pickaxe Mountain very closely. We don't see any activity there." He ended the interview more bluntly: "We're going to take out Pickaxe Mountain. Tell the Iranians to be ready."
July 21. After the Israeli intelligence assessment surfaced: "The new site that they're talking about, they're trying to possibly reconstitute a site, we'll hit that site. Any site where they're even thinking about nuclear, we'll be hitting it very, very powerfully." He said the US would hit the area "pretty soon, and very heavily."
July 28. "I know exactly what's going on at Pickaxe. It's not a big problem. We took out their nuclear sites, and we'll have to take out Pickaxe if we don't make a deal."
September 4. Trump said the US may hit the site very soon, crediting the Space Force for the intelligence. "We know everybody that's moving at Pickaxe, we know everybody that's moving everywhere, all over Iran, and if anything goes bad, we hit them. We hit them hard." He called the conflict a "military conflict" rather than a war, and added: "It's small potatoes for us."
Across two wars, the only recorded strike at the site destroyed a single vehicle on a spoil pile, thought to have been connected to air defense.
One explanation is simply that it is hard to destroy and may not yet contain anything worth destroying.
Iran has spent the interval hardening it further: concrete poured over a western entrance extension, a reinforced structure added at another portal, rock and soil pushed up over an eastern one, and by late April both eastern entrances partially backfilled to block vehicles.
A separate, smaller tunnel complex inside the same perimeter, built in 2007, was sealed shortly after the June 2025 war. What is inside it is unknown.
The other explanation is that Washington wants the option of getting in rather than burying it. Rebeccah Heinrichs of the Hudson Institute has suggested the United States may be preserving the possibility of entering or securing the complex, which would mean a ground operation rather than an air strike. There is no public evidence that one is being planned.
The Treasury Department said Golden Global Yatirim Bankasi and its asset-management and leasing subsidiaries had facilitated tens of millions of dollars in transactions for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force and provided Iranian institutions with access to international banking channels.
The action was taken under Operation Economic Outcast, a campaign launched on August 24 to target financial networks and foreign institutions that Washington says help sustain the Islamic Republic’s economy and circumvent sanctions.
Treasury alleged that the Istanbul-based bank was established to help Iran’s shadow-banking network transfer oil revenues from China to Turkey, where money exchangers could convert the proceeds into cash and gold. It also accused Golden Global of knowingly offering correspondent banking services that enabled transactions through accounts controlled by the IRGC-QF and its proxies.
Golden Global rejected the allegations, saying it had complied with domestic and international banking and compliance requirements and had no direct or indirect dealings with the individuals and entities named in the US sanctions decision. The bank said it would pursue its legal rights over what it called unfounded allegations.
Iran International also contacted Golden Global for comment on the Treasury allegations and whether it planned to challenge the designation, but had not received a response at the time of publication.
The three entities were added to the Treasury’s Specially Designated Nationals list, blocking property and interests in property under US jurisdiction and generally barring US persons from transactions involving them. Treasury also issued a general license allowing transactions necessary to wind down dealings with the sanctioned entities.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent described the designation in an interview with America’s Voice News as “code for you are out of business” and said another bank could be sanctioned as soon as next week.
“We know who you are, you know who you are, it’s over,” Bessent said, adding that US allies were assisting the campaign.
The move comes a week after Washington targeted the UAE operations of Banque Misr, Egypt’s second-largest bank, using a different legal mechanism.
Rather than imposing a full OFAC designation, the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network proposed a rule under Section 311 of the USA Patriot Act that would prohibit US financial institutions from opening or maintaining correspondent accounts for Banque Misr UAE. The proposal is subject to a public comment process before it can be finalized.
Treasury estimated that Banque Misr UAE processed about $1.8 billion between January 2024 and June 2026 for 103 companies potentially linked to Iranian shadow-banking networks.
An Iran International investigation subsequently found that funds originating from Iran’s central bank were being directed to accounts at Banque Misr’s UAE operations as early as November 2022, based on leaked correspondence and transaction records from sanctioned Iranian lender Bank Parsian. The investigation found no evidence that the foreign banks involved knowingly facilitated sanctions evasion.
The Golden Global designation represents a further escalation from the Banque Misr action. Bessent told Reuters last week that Treasury expected to announce new secondary sanctions roughly every week, initially focusing on banks.
“You’re going to see a lot more of these every week,” he said. “We’re starting with the banks, and we’re telling the banks it’s not okay to have Iranian money and to aid the regime.”
The campaign marks an effort by Washington to move beyond already-sanctioned Iranian institutions and target the foreign financial infrastructure that US officials say allows Tehran to turn overseas revenues into money it can use.
When launching Operation Economic Outcast on August 24, Bessent said Washington’s objective was to “sever every economic lifeline” sustaining the Islamic Republic. He also appealed directly to Iranian soldiers facing economic hardship and invoked the fall of the Berlin Wall, when East German forces ultimately declined to fire on civilians.
Friday’s action also marked the first time a bank in a NATO member state had been targeted under the new campaign, according to Reuters, underscoring the widening reach of Washington’s effort as Treasury signals that further action against foreign banks is likely to follow.
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.
