ANKARA: Turkey has revoked the licence of Iran’s Bank Mellat, a semi-private financial entity that has been subject to Western sanctions for years, the official gazette said early Saturday. The decision was announced some two weeks after Washington slapped sanctions on a Turkish bank over alleged ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) although it was not immediately clear whether the two issues were related.
The move follows a decision by Turkey’s banking regulator over the Tehran-based bank, which provides financial support to Iran’s government and is subject to US, EU and UK sanctions, according to OpenSanctions, an open-source database of information on sanctions-hit entities.
The Iranian government is also the largest shareholder of the bank, it said. In revoking Bank Mellat’s licence, the Turkish regulator cited article 71b of the banking law, which says the entity’s “continued operation poses a threat to the rights of depositors and participation fund holders and to the security and stability of the financial system”.