Financial Times Profiles Intensive UANI Campaign to Deter Iran Business

The May 2 print edition of the Financial Times (FT) profiled United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI)’s launch of an international campaign to discourage companies from doing business in Iran, “warning that they could fall foul of remaining sanctions.”

UANI will use a mixture of paid advertisements in newspapers and on social media, public letters, op-eds, and letters to the editor “to put pressure on multinationals that have either returned to Iran since the deal or are thinking of doing so.” UANI will be sending hundreds of these corporate demand letters over the next months, and has already sent dozens of them to corporations such as General Electric, Fiat, Siemens, Bombardier and Maersk, as well as major South Korean companies.

UANI CEO Ambassador. Mark D. Wallace told the FT, “As they get on a plane to Tehran, companies need to have a hard look at the business risk… The risk profile has not fundamentally changed.”

This week, UANI sent a delegation to the Europe-Iran Forum in Zurich, Switzerland to raise awareness of the risks of pursuing business in Iran, and also had full-page notices on Iran business risks published in Korean in Wall Street Journal Asia and in Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, as those two countries sent trade delegations to Iran.

The FT profile of UANI was broadly reported on in international media, including in Arabic (BBC, Al-Alam, Tasnim), English (Kayhan, Tehran Times, Bidness), French (Press TV), German (20 Minuten), Italian (America 24), Korean (Yonhap, Kyunghyang Shinmun, Hankook-Ilbo) Persian (Mehr, Raja), and Spanish (HispanTV).

Following the signing of the JCPOA, UANI initiated an intensive international campaign warning companies worldwide about the substantial legal, financial, and reputational risks of doing business in Iran. As part of the international campaign launch, UANI also released an open letter detailing the many hazards that business with Iran could trigger, signed by dozens of prominent defense and foreign policy experts. Signatories include former Homeland Security Advisor Fran Townsend, former Acting and Deputy CIA Director Michael Morell, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, Senators Kit Bond and Norm Coleman, Ambassador Dennis Ross, and former National Security Advisor to the Vice President John Hannah, among others. The letter calls on the global business community to fully consider the potentially grave consequences of business ties to Iran, citing a host of risks.

About UANI

UANI is an independent, not-for-profit, non-partisan, advocacy group founded in 2008 by Ambassador Mark D. Wallace, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, former CIA Director Jim Woolsey, and Middle East Expert Ambassador Dennis Ross, that seeks to heighten awareness of the danger the Iranian regime poses to the world.

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