BERLIN. Sept. 26 (Xinhua) -- German exports to Iran are already suffering from the re-imposition of U.S. sanctions against the country, recent trade data obtained by Xinhua on Wednesday from the German Association of the Chambers of Industry and Commerce (DIHK) shows.
Speaking to Xinhua, DIHK trade expert Volker Treier said that German exports to Iran had fallen by 18 percent since the announcement of the punitive economic measures by the United States. Treier noted that many of the once over 100 German companies with offices in Iran closed these again.
The first concrete evidence of resulting harm to German-Iranian bilateral trade was thus provided by the DIHK less than two months after U.S. sanctions were enacted in August.
Aside from barring domestic Iranian companies from acquiring dollars, even foreign financial institutes which have subsidiaries in the U.S. face reprisals unless they refuse to become involved in any transactions with counterparties from Iran. Most European banks have consequently begun winding down their operations in Iran for fear of losing access U.S. capital markets as a punishment, depriving German exporters of liquidity needed to conduct business with the country.
Treier predicted on Wednesday that a lack of available payments systems would continue to pose the "greatest obstacle" to German trade with Iran in the foreseeable future. "Even companies that are not directly affected by U.S. sanctions, for example those in the medical and health care sector, or those without U.S. business, currently cannot find a bank that process their Iranian transactions," he said.
Dagmar von Bohnstein, German business delegate in Iran, has recently emphasized that domestic companies in Iran are in urgent need of political solutions which enable them bypassing U.S. capital markets. Responding to such calls, all signatories of the original nuclear deal, except for the United States, announced on Monday that they would take steps to establish a new "Special Purpose Vehicle" towards that end.
The EU has mulled diverse legislative initiatives, including the expansion of the state-owned European Investment Bank (EIB)'s activities in Iran, to shield European companies from U.S. sanctions and deter them from fleeing the country. While the DIHK welcomed the latest developments with view to the multilateral SPV, it lamented delays in the elaboration of the proposal and cautioned that an improvement of the commercial situation would hence only be felt in the mid- to long-term.
The DIHK estimates that the EU exported goods worth more than 6 billion euros (7 billion U.S. dollars) to Iran in the first half of 2018 and imported goods worth 4.5 billion euros during the same period. A second raft of even stricter U.S. sanctions against Iran is scheduled to take effect in November and could result in a further reduction in the volume of German-Iranian trade without mitigating action on behalf of policymakers.
German policymakers and business representatives have repeatedly criticized the United States' pullout from the Iran nuclear accord, urging Berlin and Brussels to do everything in its power to save the landmark international agreement.
