London: Despite checks and balances in place, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has moved about $1 billion in cryptocurrencies over the past two years, according to a report by blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs.
According to the report, the IRGC, Iran’s leading security and military organisation, skirted the wide-ranging sanctions against it to transfer funds via Tether (USDT) to entities affiliated with it. The money was transferred through two UK-linked companies Zedcex and Zedxion, which were, in turn, related to each other. In fact, almost 56% of the total value of crypto volumes came from the IRGC, the report concluded.
Further investigations revealed that both companies are incorporated in the UK only on paper, with their UK corporate filings showing nominal directors and virtual office addresses. Zedxion was incorporated in May 2021 by one Babak Morteza Zanjani, a person previously sanctioned by the US and EU for funnelling money to the IRGC. These sanctions were later lifted as part of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal signed at the time.
This poses a cause of concern for the cryptocurrency markets, as this money was transferred relatively unnoticed for so long, and has renewed regulators’ concerns about terror financing due to the relative ease in transferring money through cryptocurrency exchanges.
