US maintains there are no exclusions for Indian companies in the Chabahar accord

May 14, Washington: The US has said that Indian businesses doing business with Iran would not be spared from the existing sanctions, only hours after Iran and India inked a 10-year pact over the Chabahar port.

This is a significant departure from the prior reprieve from sanctions that the Trump administration offered in 2018, the year that the then-president renounced the nuclear agreement with Iran that was inked by President Barack Obama.

While the agreement was a bilateral matter between India and Iran and that India was free to run its foreign policy as it saw fit, Vedant Patel, the Principal Deputy Spokesperson for the US State Department, told reporters on Monday that “any entity (or) anyone considering business deals with Iran… need to be aware of the potential risks that they’re opening themselves up to the term risk of sanctions.”

When asked if there will be no exceptions, the spokesperson said, “No.”

He was answering inquiries over the ten-year deal that New Delhi and Tehran had inked allowing India to run the Chabahar port.

Due to Pakistan’s refusal to allow the use of its territory, an exception was given in 2018 to enable India to build and expand the port in south Iran and export goods to Afghanistan and other countries.