Britain’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) has rejected a plea from the Foreign Office to hand over £400m owed by the UK government to Iran from a decades-old British tank sale, saying it is not prepared to give the money to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the Guardian understands.
The case is important because if the money were transferred, as an international arbitration court has ruled it should be, it is more likely that the jailed British-Iranian woman Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe would be released.
An international arbitration court ruled in 2009 that the UK must pay the money back but Britain’s own high court has yet to issue a ruling on the subject.'