The 4th joint JCPOA commission met with Iran and 5+1 representatives sitting in Vienna's Palais Coburg on Tuesday for 3 hours, where Abbas Araghchi of Iran and a senior nuclear negotiator told reporters that the major issue of the session was sanctions and removal of sanctions where Iran has some grievances and concerns voiced during the session; "we extensively discussed where there has been little progress; the US and the EU contended that they had been working according to the JCPAO, with ongoing attempts on this direction; they provided also some clues that they had been cooperating in removing the psychological atmosphere grip on trade with Iran," Araghchi told the press. "Our concerns on the other hand directly touched their inaction and failure in not succeeding in removal of sanctions and in effect creating a wall of distrust."
"We agreed that a next session within 3 months will address sanctions, banking restrictions on Iran, money transfer, money exchange, and any other type of sanctions; we hope we will solve larger part of issues by the next session and will provide some proposals in that session," he told reporters. "All sides were unanimous on the fact that merely talking about problems should be corrected with concrete action of implementation of JCPOA; we also discussed some technical points, for example, misconceptions between Iran and IAEA, and between Iran and 5+1, to which the session provided some solutions."
On a question of addressing the critical issue of crippling restrictions on Iran's banking sector and its transactions with outer world, Araghchi said that there was no single interpretation of the issue among all sides; "however some criticized the US of creating a condition of inaction for companies seeking to work with Iran, especially with US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) which usually oversees implementation of sanctions on Iran and other countries; they contended that the OFAC has not been transparent enough for companies to give them options and to go forward without fears of financial damage; generally, they complained that their companies are still beclouded about the sanctions on Iran; the OFAC does not provide a certain pathway which would be safe for them to walk in," Araghchi told the press.
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