“Our government has been in talks with Iran about ways to use the frozen assets, and the Iran side has expressed its consent to the proposals we have made," the South Korean foreign ministry said without providing further details, Yonhap reported.
"The actual unfreezing of the assets will be carried out through consultations with related countries, including the United States," it added.
The announcement came after the Central Bank of Iran said it had reached an agreement with South Korea on the release of frozen Iranian assets in the East Asian country.
The Central Bank of Iran Governor Abdolnaser Hemmati and South Korea’s Ambassador to Tehran Ryu Jeong-Hyun held a meeting at the request of the Korean Embassy, reaching an agreement on how to release and spend part of Iran’s assets blocked in South Korea, according to the CBI.
It said the two sides have come to an agreement on transferring the Iranian financial resources to certain destinations, as South Korea has been informed about the CBI’s decisions about the volume of the transactions and the destination banks.
The South Korean ambassador has reportedly expressed Seoul’s readiness to take whatever measures necessary to use all of Iran’s financial resources in South Korea “without any limits”.
The CBI chief has welcomed a shift in South Korea’s policy, saying, “Although the Islamic Republic of Iran welcomes a change in the stances of countries and increased cooperation, the bank’s legal actions to demand compensation for non-cooperation from the Korean banks in recent years will remain in place.”
The top Iranian banker has made it clear that South Korea should make a great deal of effort to make up for the negative attitude it had taken in the past.
Since 2019 when then US president, Donald Trump, ended the US sanctions waivers for South Korea to buy Iran’s oil, Tehran and Seoul have been at loggerheads over the latter’s blocking of some seven billion dollars of Iran’s cash assets.
MR/PR