(Reuters) – With international sanctions squeezingIran, the Islamic Republic is seeking to expand its banking foothold in the Caucasus nation of Armenia to make up for difficulties in countries it used to rely on to do business, according to diplomats and documents.
Iran’s growing interest in its neighbor Armenia, a mountainous, landlocked country of about 3.3 million people, comes at a time of rising international isolation for Tehran and increasing scrutiny by Western governments and intelligence agencies of Iranian banking ties worldwide as they attempt to stifle the country’s nuclear program.
The most recent example is British bank Standard Chartered, which has been in the spotlight due to U.S. charges that it hid from U.S. regulators and shareholders some $250 billion of transactions tied to Iran.
An expanded local-currency foothold in a neighbor like Armenia, a former Soviet republic which has close trade ties to Iran and is working hard to forge closer links to the European Union, could make it easier for Tehran to obfuscate payments to and from foreign clients and deceive Western intelligence agencies trying to prevent it from expanding its nuclear and missile programs.
Armenian officials denied illicit banking links to Iran. The country’s central bank issued a press release in response to this article, stating that it requires all banks to scrutinize their transactions to avoid dubious financial exchanges.
“The Central Bank of Armenia will follow its supervision over the behavior and transactions of all financial institutions and their customers in … Armenia, in order to safeguard its financial system from any destabilizing effects,” it said.
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