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Iran Hoarding Gold

Iran Hoarding Gold
Kenneth R. Timmerman
Wednesday, June 7, 2006

WASHINGTON -- Iranians are going for the gold - at least until someone else cuts them off.

To forestall an effort by the West to seize Iranian assets in Europe, the Iranian leadership decided last fall to begin a massive, secret repatriation of its international currency reserves, according to Central Bank of Iran documents.

The documents were obtained by an Iranian opposition group and shared with Newsmax.

The documents detail eight shipments in chartered jumbo jets from Zurich's Kloten airport. The shipments, from October through late November, brought 250 tons of gold bullion from the vaults of Swiss banks to Tehran.

The gold was purchased by Bank Markazi (the Central Bank of Iran) from Credit Suisse in Zurich, the documents showed.

Three of the eight flights attracted the attention of amateur aircraft spotters, because the planes were painted in the distinctive livery of Iran Air, which rarely flies into Zurich.

The spotters noted a 747-200 at the airport on Oct. 24, 2005, and an Airbus A-300 that made two rotations, on Nov. 14 and Nov. 23. They provided that information to Jetstream, a glossy, German-language monthly published in Zurich.

Other chartered aircraft handled five additional rotations, before word of the shipments leaked out. Each plane transported between 28-35 tons of gold, although the 747-200, initially designed as a freighter, could have taken as much as 100 tons of cargo, according to Boeing.

Iran's leadership wanted to purchase 700 tons of gold, according to the Organization of the People's Fedaii Guerillas of Iran (OPFGI), a communist opposition group that obtained the Central Bank documents.

However, their secret effort to convert Iran's foreign currency holdings into gold appears to have stopped when word leaked out earlier this year.

The gold is now being held in the vaults of the Bank Markazi in Tehran, the group said.

A Credit Suisse spokesman, Andres Luther, told Newsmax by phone from Zurich that it was bank policy not to comment on its clients. However, if the bank had shipped gold to Iran last autumn, "I can assure you that we fulfilled all the reporting requirements the state demands of us."

Credit Suisse, Switzerland's second largest bank, announced on Jan. 23 that it would no longer accept new business in Iran or Syria. Mr. Luther said the bank's decision was not in response to U.S. pressure, as previously reported.

"We made this decision on our own after looking at developments in the region and assessing the increased economic risks for our bank and for our clients of doing business in Iran," he said.

The asset repatriation plan was set into motion just weeks after former Revolutionary Guards officer Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took over as president of the Islamic Republic of Iran last August.

The decision was made during a strategic planning session of top regime leaders in Tehran, who were examining Iran's options in the nuclear face-off with the West.

The meeting was chaired by Supreme Leader ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and included top intelligence officials, strategists and former president Ali-Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, the so-called "moderate" that Ahmadinejad beat in the presidential run-off election in the summer.


LINK: http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2006/6/6/151138.shtml?s=lh