America can bankrupt Iran’s insiders — And it should

Tens of billions of dollars have been siphoned out of the Iranian economy by the Islamic Republic’s insiders over the past decade. If the U.S. wasn’t watching then, it is now.

“We now know where the Iranian leadership bank accounts are, and those are being frozen,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Thursday.

His message is the right one: America can bankrupt Iran’s elite, undermining their loyalty to Mojtaba Khamenei and his cronies. But knowing where the money is going is not the same as recovering it. Fortunately, the United States has dealt with this problem before.

After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the United States and its allies froze $300 billion in Russian Central Bank reserves and tens of billions more in offshore oligarch wealth through the Russian Elites, Proxies, and Oligarchs (REPO) taskforce, a multilateral group launched by the G7, European Union, and Australia in 2022 to identify, freeze, and seize assets of sanctioned Russians. The Department of Justice’s Task Force KleptoCapture, an initiative to target Russian oligarchs’ assets and stymie sanctions evasion, seized hundreds of millions more.

The same could be done for Iran. And the target set may already be in plain sight.

During January’s crackdown on popular protests, high-level regime figures reportedly transferred $1.5 billion to accounts in Dubai in just 48 hours — much of it via cryptocurrency — with Mojtaba Khamenei himself allegedly accounting for $328 million of that sum before taking on the role of Iran’s supreme leader. Some estimates suggest the Mojtaba’s assets may total several billion dollars.

Iran’s Central Bank’s own data show roughly $80 billion in capital flight between 2018 and 2024, much of it flowing through channels linked to government insiders. A large proportion of these funds have gone into Western banks. Data from the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network identified $9 billion in potential Iranian shadow banking activity flowing through U.S. correspondent accounts in 2024 alone, with $5 billion moving through shell companies and $4 billion through oil-related front companies based primarily in the UAE and Singapore.

The United States sanctioned Mojtaba in 2019 for his ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. However, his key financial enabler, businessman Ali Ansari, has only been sanctioned by the United Kingdom. Ansari met Mojtaba during the Iran-Iraq war and later secured preferential contracts in sectors including shipping, construction and petrochemicals. Ansari was also the principal shareholder in Ayandeh Bank, which collapsed under $5 billion in losses and helped fuel the protests in which as many as 30,000 people were killed.

On March 17, one of the world’s largest investigative journalism organizations — the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project — revealed that Ansari owns a luxury villa in Marbella, Spain, through a chain of U.K.- and Spanish-registered shell companies. The report follows a year-long Bloomberg investigation and a Financial Times report that together trace a property portfolio spanning Europe valued at roughly $440 million — all linked to Ansari and the Khamenei family.

An Iran equivalent to the Russia-focused REPO task force could bring together the United States, United Kingdom, EU member states, and key financial centers to go after these assets. But this will only work if Washington and its allies close the sanctions gaps that have allowed the regime to accumulate wealth in the open.

If Treasury knows where the Iranian leadership’s bank accounts are, it should start by designating the enablers, like Ansari, who manage them. It should also push known financial secrecy havens like the United Arab Emirates, which are weighing whether to freeze billions in regime-linked assets, to pull the trigger. Simply put, this is a matter of political will and human resourcing.

Treasury should also work to close structural loopholes that limit the effectiveness of sanctions. Ansari, who claims to be a Cypriot in documents, is the registered beneficial owner of Birch Ventures Limited, the Isle of Man company holding the London mansion portfolio. Yet development plans for those properties do not appear to hurt by Ansari’s sanctions designation in the U.K. This is because, under U.S. and U.K. sanctions law, sanctions on an individual do not automatically apply to the companies under their control unless they own a majority stake.

That means a sanctioned person can still be the registered beneficial owner of a company — by definition the person that ultimately controls it — and profit from its assets without the company itself being blocked. Lawmakers on both sides of the pond should close that gap.

In January, Bessent described Iranian regime insiders as “rats on a sinking ship.” He was right. The question now is whether Washington will seize their fortunes and hold them for the people of Iran when the Islamic Republic falls.

Max Meizlish is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). He previously served in the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. Susan Soh is a research associate at FDD.