The UK will facilitate the release of the Iranian oil tanker detained by Gibraltar earlier this month if Iran gave guarantees that the crude loaded on that vessel wasn’t bound for Syria, the UK’s Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt said over the weekend. In early July, Gibraltar, assisted by Royal Marines, detained a super tanker carrying crude oil to Syria because it had “reasonable grounds” to believe that the Iranian ship Grace 1 was violating European Union sanctions against Syria. Shipping data that Reuters has reviewed suggests that the tanker en route to Syria was loaded with Iranian oil off the Iranian coast. If the tanker indeed loaded oil from Iran, it was not only in breach of EU sanctions on the Syrian entity owning the refinery believed to be the destination of the oil, but it also violated the U.S. sanctions on Iran’s oil exports. Tensions between the UK […]