As Iranian-Turkish businessman Reza Zarrab was telling a New York court about how he devised ways to scuttle sanctions on Iran, shadily documented and hard-to-justify levels of gold trade between Turkey and United Arab Emirates have appeared once again.
Before the United States put gold on its list of Iran sanctions, the surge in Turkey’s gold exports to Iran and the UAE was a clear indicator of Turkey paying for its oil and natural gas imports with gold. There is no other way to explain how Turkey’s gold exports to Iran went from $54 million in 2011 to $6.5 billion in 2012.