Bessent says new Iran sanctions will land every week, with another bank next

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday, Aug. 30, that the United States expects to announce new secondary sanctions against Iran every week, and that Washington is preparing to sanction another bank. Secondary sanctions do not target Iranians; they target the foreign banks and companies that handle Iranian money, by threatening to cut them off from the U.S. financial system. That threat has teeth, because almost every large bank needs dollar access to do business. The United Arab Emirates is reviewing Banque Misr, the Egyptian state bank whose Emirati branches Washington moved against days earlier. Bloomberg reported that as of the end of the week, countries that still trade with Tehran had shown little response to the promised campaign.

What the Banque Misr action actually does — and does not do:

• It is a proposed rule, not a blocking designation (an order that freezes the money outright): once final, U.S. banks would have to reject transactions with the UAE branches and run extra checks on related payments. Nothing is cut off yet.
• Treasury says those branches moved about $1.8 billion for 103 companies possibly tied to Iranian shadow banking — networks of front firms that move money for a sanctioned country — between January 2024 and June 2026, or roughly $60 million a month.
• Banque Misr's Egyptian operation is untouched. Only the Dubai branches are named.
• The UAE review is a separate track: its central bank can fine the branches, replace their managers or pull their license, but only if it finds a breach of Emirati law. A U.S. allegation alone does not do it.
• For scale, FinCEN — the Treasury unit that tracks suspicious money — flagged about $9 billion in suspected Iranian shadow-banking flows through all U.S. correspondent accounts (the accounts foreign banks use to reach the dollar system) in 2024 alone, against the $1.8 billion Treasury traced to the Dubai branches over two and a half years.