All that glitters is not enriched uranium – by Matthew Hart (Globe and Mail – November 21, 2013)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

As Iran’s Supreme Leader talked about “red lines” and U.S. President Barack Obama struggled to head off tougher sanctions that could derail his diplomacy, a powerful subtext rippled beneath the surface of Iranian negotiations with the West when they resumed Wednesday: Which metal does Iran want most, at least in the short term – enriched uranium or gold?

Until this summer, the gold trade with Turkey provided a loophole through which much-needed Western currencies flowed into Iran. Tehran urgently wants that loophole opened up again. Here’s how it worked.

Iran sold oil and gas to Turkey. The buyer paid in Turkish lira deposited to an Iranian account in Turkey’s state-owned Halkbank. Iranian gold dealers had access to the Halkbank money, and used it to buy gold in Turkey. The gold was then hand-carried from Turkey to Dubai and sold to traders for the dollars and euros Iran so desperately needs.

Turkey can openly buy oil and gas from Iran because it has a waiver under the sanctions protocols that prohibit other countries from doing so. However, the gold flow to Iran enabled a more robust exception to the sanctions than envisaged by the waiver.

In January, Mr. Obama moved to close the loophole. He signed an executive order prohibiting the sale of gold bullion to Iran. The order gave Turkey six months to comply, meaning that it came into effect only this summer.

This means that it is only in the past four months that Iran has endured the fullest, most withering effect of the sanctions, a fact that perhaps accounts in some degree for the openness to dialogue now evident.

Gold has always been popular with criminals and sanctions busters, both because of its anonymity and its liquidity – the ease with which it is converted into cash. But today it is especially attractive to the black economy, for the single reason that it’s worth so much.

Last year, for example, an NGO researching the brutal larcenies of Congo’s gold fields, and the way that gold was gushing across the border without providing any benefit to the country it came from, calculated that $30,000 worth of gold could fit in a pocket and $700,000 in a briefcase. This rich prize has fuelled a stupefying surge in theft.

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