U.S. warns against financial dealings with Iran

The United States warned governments and the private sector to crack down on what it described as Iranian efforts to exploit them to fund its support for terrorism, destabilizing actions in the region and rights abuses at home.

"You must harden your financial networks, require your companies to do extra due diligence to keep them from being caught in Iran’s deceptive web, and make clear the very significant risks of doing business with companies and persons there," Under Secretary of the Treasury Sigal Mandelker said.

"Companies doing business in Iran face substantial risks, and those risks are even greater as we reimpose nuclear-related sanctions. We will hold those doing prohibited business in Iran to account," she added.

"To those in the private sector, I urge you to also take additional steps to ensure Iran and its proxies are not exploiting your companies to support their nefarious activities. You have to do more to make sure your compliance programs are airtight," Reuters cited her as saying.