Washington sanctions Iranian insurance scheme for Hormuz transits
The United States has sanctioned two Iranian companies accused of running an extortion scheme, backed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, that requires commercial ships to buy maritime insurance before transiting the Strait of Hormuz. The Treasury Department said Persian Gulf Marine Insurance Company and HormuzSafe Marine Services Authority sell mandatory, Iranian-approved policies that purport to protect vessels from seizure and other risks, while the risks in question are largely created by Tehran itself.
HormuzSafe also accepts payment in bitcoin and other digital assets, an arrangement Washington says allows Iran to evade sanctions while tightening its grip on traffic through the strait. US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent accused Iran of holding global commerce hostage and of using international shipping to finance the Revolutionary Guard. The designation places any counterparty dealing with the two entities at risk of secondary measures, which in practice means owners must weigh the cost of refusing a policy against the consequences of paying for one.
The action lands in the middle of an unresolved argument over who manages the strait. Tehran is pushing for greater oversight of both inbound and outbound traffic, while Oman has promoted a regional mechanism designed to prevent Iran exercising sole control. Neither position has been settled, and the insurance question has become a proxy for the larger dispute: a vessel that buys an Iranian-approved policy is implicitly accepting Iranian authority over a waterway that has been governed by an internationally agreed routing scheme for decades.
Alongside the two companies, the Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned eight tankers and the firms that own or manage them for carrying Iranian crude and petroleum products. The vessels named are the 2006-built Well Sail, Lily, Al Salmi, Breeze V, Natsumi, Crystal, Nireta and Yehope. They are linked to companies registered in China, Hong Kong and the Marshall Islands and sail under flags including Mozambique, Barbados and Vanuatu. Washington said the ships had carried millions of barrels of Iranian oil since 2022, primarily to China.
The latest designations take the number of vessels tied to Iran's shadow fleet sanctioned by the office past a hundred since the start of the year, part of a campaign intended to restrict Tehran's oil revenues and support military interdiction efforts. The scale of that list indicates both the size of the parallel fleet and the difficulty of shutting it down. Ships change names, flags and registered managers quickly, and each designation tends to displace rather than eliminate a trade, while the insurance scheme now targeted operates on entirely legitimate vessels that simply want to pass through.
