SULAIMANI (ESTA) — Emirate of Fujairah-owned company said a cargo of crude seized by the United States under suspicion of being sanctioned Iranian oil was Iraqi crude, Bloomberg reported on Friday.
Fujairah International Oil $ Gas Corporation, owned by emirate ruler Sheikh Hamid bin Mohammed Al Sharqi, claimed that it was an intermediary seller of the cargo and that it was Iraqi oil, according to a document filed in federal court in the District in Columbia seen by Bloomberg.
The United States accused Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the IRGC-Quds force of covertly shipping the oil abroad, relaying on ship-to-ship transfers and falsifying documents to disguise the crude’s origin.
The Fujairah corporation said in June it bought two million barrels of crude from an undisclosed Iraqi supplier, who presented bills of lading issued by Iraq’s state oil marketer SOMO as proof of origin, the firm stated in the legal document.
In July, the firm said it chartered a vessel to use as an offshore floating storage facility at the Port of Fujairah in the UAE, according to Bloomberg.
FIOGC sold the oil to an unidentified Chinese buyer in October, the document read. Under the agreement, it was responsible for delivering the crude to China and rented the supertanker Achilleas for the journey.
The United States seized the cargo in December before it could depart, the filing said.
The Achilleas was rerouted to the U.S. Gulf Coast and the crude was discharged in Houston thin month, the document showed, according to Bloomberg.
Bloomberg reported last month that the U.S. Department of justice had filed a case in a U.S. district court, seeking to seize two million barrels of oil that it claimed came from Iran.
The IRGC and Quds Force “attempted to disguise the origin of the oil using ship-to-ship transfers, falsified documents, and other means, and provided a fraudulent bill of lading to deceive the owners of the Achilleas,” the department said.
It accuses them of using oil money to buy weapons of mass destruction and carry out human rights abuses.
Bloomberg reported in January that the Achilleas’ owner, Capital Ship Management Corp., alerted U.S. authorities to the possibility that it had unknowingly taken on Iranian crude, after initially thinking it came from Iraq, Bloomberg reported last month.
