Republican Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Mark Kirk (Ill.) sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew after officials told  The Associated Press they were considering allowing some offshore banks to use dollars to do currency trades for financial transactions with Iranian businesses.
“Any such efforts would benefit Iran’s financiers of international terrorism, human rights abuses, and ballistic missile threats,” the senators wrote. “We believe the United States should instead increase pressure on the Iranian regime in order to hold it fully accountable for its threatening and destabilizing activities outside of the nuclear realm.”
 
The two senators have been vocal critics of the Obama administration’s Iran policy, including its response to a series of ballistic missile tests and the separate nuclear agreement.
 
Officials told the AP that no decision was finalized and any loosening of the current prohibition would come with several restrictions, including that Iranian banks could not be directly involved.
 
Kirk and Rubio, however, said the reports had them “gravely alarmed.”
 
They want Lew to promise that they won’t allow Iran to benefit from U.S. dollars, including through “U-turn transactions” or international financial systems.
 
“Such actions would fundamentally undermine our nation’s own reputation as a global leader on anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism, and also provide Iran legitimacy in the international financial system that it has not earned,” they wrote.
 
They added that “it is critical to preserve the U.S. dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency, including by ensuring that countries engaged in destabilizing activities do not have the privilege of processing transactions in U.S. dollars.”
 

Source: BBC, March 31