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The Tehran-based Special Trade and Finance Institute (STFI) is to serve as a sister body to Europe’s Instrument In Support of Trading Exchanges (Instex), designed to skirt sanctions partly by providing anonymity and avoiding links that could connect through to the US financial system and USD.
STFI has starting capital of IRR1bn (around $24,000).
France, Germany and the UK on January 31 announced the establishment of special purpose vehicle (SPV) Instex to enable food and medicine transactions between European and Iranian parties. Food and medicine trades are not subject to US sanctions, but the EU has said it intends to add sanctionable trades to those that can be conducted via Instex.
The British, French and Germans addressed the difficulty of creating Instex by devising a model that shares the risk of US reprisals—the payment channel is based in Paris, it is managed by German banker Per Fischer, who was head of financial institutions at Commerzbank between 2003 and 2014, and it comes with a board that has UK decision-making participation.
However, Instex has certainly not impressed the Islamic Republic's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He has described it as a " meaningless" measure and "a bitter joke," adding that "Europeans should have stood up to the US after it left the [Iran nuclear deal]."
2.3 Putin says to meet Iranian, Azerbaijani counterparts at Russia summit in August
Russian President Vladimir Putin has said he will meet with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani at a summit in Russia during August.
He informed journalists of the trilateral meeting in Beijing on April 26 after meeting with Aliyev on the sidelines of China’s Belt and Road Initiative forum. "We agreed to hold another Russian-Azerbaijani-Iranian summit in Russia in August," Putin said.
The last meeting between Putin, Aliyev and Rouhani was at a summit in Tehran in November 2017. At that gathering, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told Putin that Tehran and Moscow must work more intensively to isolate the US and help stabilise the Middle East. Iran and Russia are the main allies of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Like Russia, Azerbaijan opposes the US strategy of using sanctions in an attempt at strangling the Iranian economy to force concessions on Tehran’s Middle East policy, although it is not particularly outspoken on the issue. Russia, meanwhile, has been quite limited in what it has provided Iran in terms of trade and economic backing since the latest waves of US sanctions on Iran began, despite some big pledges.
6 IRAN Country Report May 2019 www.intellinews.com