Tehran’s trouble this autumn is not only the oil it cannot sell. It is also the oil it sold long ago. With an American naval blockade around Iran’s ports and new sanctions on its crude, the Islamic Republic has turned to an older ledger, the one recording revenue from earlier sales that the state says never came back, as Al Jazeera reported.

In September a spokesperson for Iran’s judiciary put a number on it. A network of oil intermediaries, known in Iran as “trustees”, owed the government between 10 billion euros ($11bn) and 11 billion euros ($12bn). That is about half of all the oil revenue projected in the government budget for the current fiscal year. Half of a year’s expected oil income, sitting in the accounts of the state’s own middlemen, or nowhere at all.

In Washington this is read as a scorecard. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in August that “Iran’s shadow banking system was buckling,” and American officials point to the missing billions as evidence that their pressure is working. The war that the United States and Israel launched in late February has since left the country’s exports strangled and its currency, the rial, at record lows.

A state that could not sell its own oil

The trustees were born of an earlier siege. In 2012 the United States and Europe imposed sanctions on Iran’s oil sales and on the collection of its revenue, with the stated aim of starving the nuclear programme of money. The Oil Ministry could no longer sell crude in the ordinary way; the Central Bank could no longer collect payment. So the state began handing crude to domestic buyers, or using it to settle what it owed.

The first recipients tell the story of that era better than any decree. The Oil Industry Pension Fund, which looks after retired Oil Ministry staff. Khatam al-Anbiya Construction Base, a giant of Iranian infrastructure. The municipal police, paid in crude oil. Each was supposed to sell the barrels, pass the proceeds to the treasury, and then recover its agreed costs and claims. Some sold the oil themselves. Others hired private traders, adding another pair of hands between the well and the treasury.

The gaps between what the state expected and what actually reached it opened early, and they produced some of the largest corruption cases in the Islamic Republic’s history.

Prison, then the old habits

For a short time the experiment seemed finished. After the nuclear deal, the JCPOA, lifted oil sanctions in 2016, the government took sales back into its own hands, and sellers who had failed to return the money went to prison.

Then, in 2018, Donald Trump, in his first term, pulled the United States out of the deal, and Iran went back to the private traders. The old problems came back with them: money returned late or not at all, holes in the accounts, sellers in debt, cargoes seized at sea. Washington widened its sanctions to banks, exchange offices, companies and individuals, and blacklisted traders faster and faster. A trader whose accounts were frozen could not repay even if he wanted to. The debts piled up.

Tehran’s answer was to recruit more traders, each moving smaller volumes, so that no single blacklisting could stop the flow. It also meant more places for the money to stop. Iranian officials have accused trustees of using the very workarounds the state depended on to enrich themselves.

Here a reflection, and only that: a government that must hide its trade from the world ends up hiding it from itself. The secrecy that protects the cargo also protects whoever is holding the cash.

Cases, fugitives, a question

In July, Iran International reported that officials had admitted on state television that intermediaries had misappropriated at least $1.6 billion in oil revenue. Zabihollah Khodaeian, head of the State Inspection Organization, said one intermediary alone had kept $200 million of state money and then fled the country, and that 59 criminal cases had been opened against managers of trustee companies, some of them in custody, others abroad. Prosecutors reportedly asked Interpol for Red Notices on 15 fugitives tied to the network, which often works through the UAE, Turkey and Oman. Iranian law has never clearly defined who the trustees are, how they are chosen, what they are paid or who watches them.

Majid Reza Hariri, head of the Iran-China Chamber of Commerce, wrote publicly to Tehran’s prosecutor that the fugitives had taken “billions of dollars”, an estimate no one has independently verified. He asked the question that hangs over the whole affair:

Who introduced these trusties? Who guaranteed them?

The oil minister, Mohsen Paknejad, had his answer ready: his ministry’s role ended at marketing and selling the crude, and it was the Central Bank that decided where the revenue went and supervised the transfers. In early October, Paknejad resigned as exports dried up under American pressure.

Threats against a frozen account

The head of the judiciary has warned that sellers who do not return the proceeds will face legal action. But a warning from a Tehran courtroom does not unfreeze a bank account in a third country, nor lift the sanctions that keep some sellers from paying even when they want to. What the state calls debt is a mixture of unpaid sums, disputed obligations and accusations of theft, and nobody has published how much of each it holds.

The system was invented fourteen years ago to move oil past a blockade. Now the blockade is a real one, of warships, the strait itself is contested, and the treasury is chasing money from barrels that left the country years ago, through hands it chose itself.