The United States on Tuesday blacklisted another Iranian state-owned bank for its role in an increasingly sophisticated campaign by Tehran to evade international sanctions, a senior US Treasury official said. The Treasury has designated Iran's Bank of Industry and Mine as a proliferator of weapons of mass destruction for handling transactions on behalf of two previously sanctioned institutions, Bank Mellat and Europaeisch-Iranische Handelsbank.
"This is a reasonably sophisticated effort by Iran to escape from international sanctions," the official said on condition of anonymity because the action had not yet been made public. The official said the addition of the 21st Iranian state bank to the US sanctions blacklist illustrates a systematic effort by Tehran to shift international transactions to new banks in an effort to evade US, UN and European sanctions that have banned dealings with other banks.