Bethel Finance news:
India has agreed to stop paying for its Iranian oil imports via Germany, a German official said on Tuesday, ending a trade conduit that had drawn strong disapproval from the United States and Israel.
The government official confirmed newspaper reports that billions of euros of payments from India to a Hamburg-based bank handling international trade for Iranian companies had been halted.
The move followed discussions between Chancellor Angela Merkel and the Indian government in which "the Indian side explained they were moving to use a new way of payment in the future", the official said, denying that Merkel had exerted pressure at home or abroad to end the payment scheme.
Earlier, Handelsblatt business daily said the chancellor had intervened by instructing Germany's central bank, the Bundesbank, to stop clearing payments from India headed to the bank, known as EIH, which is under U.S. but not EU sanctions.
Israel, whose Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets Merkel this week, wants Germany to shut down EIH, saying it supports the spread of weapons of mass destruction by handling payments to participants in Iran's contentious nuclear programme.
The United States, Israel and the European Union suspect Iran of seeking to acquire atomic weapons. It denies the allegations and insists its programme is for peaceful energy needs.
BANK UNDER PRESSURE
EIH came under renewed scrutiny last week when it emerged that Berlin had allowed India to pay for oil purchases from Iran via the bank, after India restricted its own direct payments to Iran in order to placate Washington.
The bank, whose acronym stands for Europaeisch-Iranische Handelsbank (European-Iranian Trade Bank) said when reached by telephone that it had no comment on the decision.
The United States had pressed Germany over the matter, although Berlin officials had said their hands were tied because the bank had not broken any EU rules, which allow payments for Iranian oil and natural gas.
The move will not come without a cost for German companies, which according to Handelsblatt now face hundreds of millions of dollars in bills outstanding for products ordered by Iran, some of which the oil money would probably have covered.
India too may now face renewed difficulties in finding a way to get payments for some 9 billion euros ($12.77 billion) in annual oil purchases to Iran.
For now, the oil shipments were still coming in on the back of corporate guarantees, but India would seek a more permanent solution at a finance ministry meeting later this week, a ministry official in New Delhi said on condition of anonymity.
The end of the trade will further increase pressure on Tehran, already under a series of United Nations sanctions for refusing to freeze its uranium enrichment programme.
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