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Yahya Safavi, the military affairs advisor to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, acknowledged receipt from Tehran of the gold in exchange for the fuel it delivered to Venezuela.
“We gave Venezuela gasoline and we received gold bars for it and we brought them in by plane so there would be no problems on the road,” Safavi said in statements reported by Iran International.
He added: “We are helping all Muslim and non-Muslim countries, but they pay us for that.”
The statements by Khamenei’s adviser come as the Iranian Foreign Ministry calls reports that Iran received gold in exchange for the fuel it gave Venezuela as “incorrect.” But the government spokesman, Ali Rabiei, neither confirmed nor rejected these reports, saying: “Tehran’s relations with Caracas. No other country has business with that.”
The United States’ special representative for Iran and Venezuela, Elliott Abrams, had previously confirmed that the regime of the contested Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, resorts to exporting gold to Iran, in exchange for oil.
“We are aware of reports of additional tankers heading to Venezuela from Iran,” he said, noting that “mismanagement of the economy by the Maduro regime created the need to import gasoline into this oil-rich country.”
He stated that “the oil refining capacity in Venezuela is around 1,300,000 barrels per day”, but due to “corruption and negligence”, the refining capacity has decreased to “only around 5 percent”. so the regime has turned to “another pariah state”, which is Iran, and exported gold so that she could buy gasoline.
And Bloomberg reported in a previous report that the Venezuelan government “uses Iran to restore its dilapidated oil industry and may pay Iran its quotas with gold bars.”
On August 14, the US Department of Justice confirmed that it had seized shipments of oil that were on board four ships sent by Iran to Venezuela, stating that the shipments were linked to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
The ministry announced that the total tonnage of the shipments amounted to about 1.12 million barrels and described the matter as “the largest seizure” of oil shipments emanating from Iran.
Iran took advantage of the fuel crisis in Venezuela to test its strategy of resistance to sanctions, since it sent flights to Venezuela from the Iranian company Mahan Air, and ships, as well as many technicians from the National Petrochemical Company, although all are subject to to US sanctions, according to previous reports.
It’s worth noting that U.S. sanctions, which aim to limit Iran’s nuclear ambitions and regional influence, have forced it to cut its oil production in half, since early 2018, to less than two million barrels. per day, because refineries around the world have stopped buying their oil.
Iran announced a plan to sell its oil to Iranians in capital markets for the first time, as the government looks for ways to save its ailing economy. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani indicated, during the meeting of the government’s Economic Coordination Committee, the approval of a project to sell oil on the Energy Exchange, in order to “provide cash.”
