Free Republic

The gold appears to have been released as part of a sanctions relief package that will have awarded Iran nearly $12 billion in unfrozen cash assets by the time negotiations wrap up next week. The State Department calculates that Iran will have received a total of $11.9 billion in cash assets. The governor of Iran’s Central Bank announced to the country’s state-controlled media that the South Africans have finally returned the 13 tons of gold. “A sum of 13 tons of gold that had been purchased before and was deposited in South Africa in the past two years and could...

The first American sanctions on Iran since a moderate cleric won the presidential election there on June 14 went into effect on Monday, expanding the number of penalized industries and imposing rules that theoretically could halt all gold and currency trade by the country. Proponents of the latest round of sanctions said they could deprive the Iranians of billions of dollars of income that had evaded earlier rounds — particularly with the new prohibition on gold trade. Bullion dealers in other countries who flout the prohibition risk severe American penalties, including expulsion from the United States precious metals market.

A new and potentially significant source of demand is that of demand from Iran. Iran imported a massive $1.2 billion worth of precious metals from Turkey in April alone. Turkish exports of gold, precious metals, pearls and coins to Iran rose to $1.2 billion in April from a tiny $7,500 a year earlier, according to figures released by the state statistics institute in Ankara yesterday. This is a massive increase in demand and suggests that there may be official involvement in the imports from the Central Bank of Iran. This trend continued in May when Turkish gold imports leapt by...