Iran Sentenced Him to Death, but This Summer He Sent Bitcoin to the Guards, According to the US. France 24 on Babak Zanjani's Return

Iranian billionaire Babak Zanjani, whom a court sentenced to death in 2016 for embezzling money from state oil, is once again a financier of the Revolutionary Guards, according to the US Treasury Department. This time it is not through tankers but through the BitBank crypto exchange, which has reportedly handled the fees collected from ships in the Strait of Hormuz since June. The French broadcaster France 24 summed up his return in a single story on September 23. France 24 ↗

From Driver to Oil Trader

According to France 24, Zanjani started out in the 1990s as a driver for the governor of Iran's central bank and then worked as a currency trader. Around 2010 the Revolutionary Guards approached him to help them access money blocked by sanctions, and over the following years he sold Iranian oil through networks of companies in Turkey, Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates. The European Union and the US placed him on their sanctions lists for this in 2012 and 2013. France 24 ↗

The turning point came in Iran. He was arrested in December 2013, after the newly elected president, Hassan Rouhani, called for action against elites who had grown rich on sanctions. In March 2016 a court sentenced him to death for "spreading corruption on earth". The Iranian Oil Ministry claimed that he owed the state more than $2.25 billion for oil he had sold. NPR ↗

Euronews published a one-minute report on the verdict in March 2016:

From Prison Back to Business

The sentence was not carried out. According to Iranian investigative journalists cited by France 24, he had already left Tehran's Evin prison in June 2019 and moved to a villa in the Alborz mountains. In 2024 his sentence was reduced to 20 years in prison. In 2025 he returned publicly as the head of a conglomerate with businesses in railways, aviation, gold and media. France 24 ↗

The US Treasury Department confirms part of this picture. According to it, the railway company of his Dot One group won an $800 million contract from Iranian Railways in April 2025. In July, OFAC sanctioned Dot One companies, firms in Istanbul and Dubai linked to his crypto exchanges, and Zanjani's sister and partner. US Treasury ↗

Cryptocurrencies and Hormuz

The first sanctions this year, on January 30, targeted him and his crypto exchanges Zedcex and Zedxion. The analytics firm TRM Labs linked them to stablecoin flows of roughly a billion dollars, which, it says, were connected to the Revolutionary Guards and at their peak made up most of the exchanges' activity. TRM Labs ↗

In July the list was joined by the state-established company Hormuz Safe, which, according to the US, sells mandatory "insurance" to ships in the strait and accepts bitcoin. According to the Treasury, Zanjani promoted it to his followers on social media. US Treasury ↗ According to CoinDesk, the fee for a single tanker passage is one to two million dollars. CoinDesk ↗

The latest sanctions, from September 17, hit the BitBank exchange. Through it, Zanjani allegedly sent the Revolutionary Guards bitcoin worth hundreds of millions of dollars in June and July, and Hormuz Safe has been sending the collected fees to the regime through it since June. The list was also joined by the firm Pishtaz Simorgh, which develops BitBank, and three of Zanjani's associates from Dot One's leadership. "Today's designations of Iranian digital asset infrastructure make perfectly clear that efforts to finance the Iranian regime using cryptocurrencies are not beyond OFAC's reach," Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said. US Treasury ↗ Reuters (Arab News) ↗

Read also: Iran is preparing a new zone in the Strait of Hormuz

Limits of This View

Almost everything about Zanjani's current activities comes from one side, the US government, which is at war with Iran. According to CoinDesk, in the BitBank case the Treasury did not publish a single crypto wallet address, although it did so with older crypto sanctions, so the claimed transfers cannot be independently verified on the blockchain from the announcement. CoinDesk ↗

Zanjani rejected the American accusations. On X he wrote that Iran "never circumvents sanctions with ordinary cryptocurrencies" or traditional financial channels. France 24 is a broadcaster funded by the French state, and regarding Zanjani's current activities it relies on Washington's suspicions. France 24 ↗

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*Archive photo: Babak Zanjani (with files) at the fifth hearing of his trial in Tehran on November 1, 2015. Photo: Meghdad Madadi, Tasnim News, Wikimedia Commons, license CC BY 4.0.*