An Authorisation Is Withdrawn. The Obligations Do Not Go With It.

This summer an authorisation covering a category of Iran-related trade was issued, then withdrawn before its stated expiry with only a short wind-down. Others have written about that decision. I am not one of them: I do not advise on sanctions, and others in this network do it properly.

What interests me is what a revocation does not, by itself, decide.

An authorisation answers one question — may this be done? It does not answer the second: what rights, obligations and assets exist beneath the transaction?

If Iranian law governs, a contract's validity is ordinarily assessed when it is made. A later withdrawal of a foreign authorisation does not, by itself, retrospectively invalidate it, though it may affect performance, remedies or termination.

Nor does the claim necessarily disappear. The obligation often survives even where performance has become prohibited. Whether it is suspended, discharged or otherwise affected depends on the governing law, the contract and the precise measure.

The asset still has an owner. Freezing ordinarily restricts what may be done with property; absent a separate confiscation or transfer measure, it does not alter title.

These questions return years later. Somebody has to establish who owned the cargo, who owed whom, and whether the person who signed for the Iranian company had authority to bind it — answered from the company's articles, its registered authorities and the Official Gazette record, not from the title beneath a signature. That record does not change because a foreign authorisation changes.

There is a second layer in Europe that is routinely missed

When a European bank freezes an account or refuses a transfer, the cause is not necessarily a legal prohibition. It may be a risk-based compliance decision: the institution's own view that the file is not clear enough to justify internally. From the client's side the two look identical. Legally they are not.

One is a restriction imposed by law. The other is an evidentiary problem — and evidence can resolve the uncertainty behind it, though it cannot compel a bank to accept a transaction outside its risk appetite.

Telling them apart requires knowing what the Iranian documents actually establish, as distinct from what they appear to say. That is usually where the file stops.

Sanctions determine what may lawfully be done. They do not, by themselves, determine what rights, obligations or ownership interests exist. Treating those as one question can cost clients years.