Iran on Monday quoted legendary English playwright William Shakespeare to slam US treasury secretary Scott Bessent’s claim that Washington had seized roughly $1 billion in Tehran’s cryptocurrency holdings amid ongoing tensions in West Asia.
Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei quoted directly from the Bard of Avon’s seminal work, Macbeth, to caption a video he shared on the social media platform X, in which Bessent can be seen telling the Reagan National Economic Forum that the US “outright seized” a billion dollars in Iranian Cryptocurrency holdings.
“Now does he feel his title / Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe / Upon a dwarfish thief,” Baghaei wrote.
Iran’s Press TV said in a report that the metaphor is drawn from the tragic fall of “a usurper king whose stolen crown and robes no longer fit.”
The new US action comes amid ongoing indirect talks between Tehran and Washington, mediated by Pakistan.
What Scott Bessent had said
US treasury secretary Scott Bessent told the Reagan National Economic Forum on May 29 that the US had seized about $1 billion in Iran’s crypto holdings.
“We seized about a billion dollars of their crypto and just outright seized it… Just outright grab the wallets. Someone may be typing in right now, and they might not have realised that their wallet has been grabbed,” Bessent told the director of Ronald Reagan Institute, Roger Zakheim.
Recently, CBS News has reported, quoting a source close to Bessent, that the Donald Trump administration will use Iranian assets to help its Gulf allies recover from damage caused by Tehran’s regime during the Iran war
However, Press TV reported, quoting senior Iranian officials, that any agreement must include the “immediate and unconditional return of billions of dollars in Iranian funds unlawfully frozen in foreign banks”, calling it the rightful property of the Iranian nation. Trump has said that he won’t unfreeze any Iranian funds until a deal is reached.
Trump’s refusal
Donald Trump said in an interview broadcast on Sunday that he will not unfreeze Iranian assets before reaching an agreement with Tehran.
Asked whether he would be willing, as part of a potential agreement, to unfreeze Iranian assets or lift certain sanctions against Iran, Trump replied: “No.”
“(That) comes after. If they behave, if they do a good job, we start talking,” he said in the interview with NBC, recorded on Friday.
Trump reiterated that he knows exactly where the enriched uranium is located in Iran and wants to recover it one way or another, while remaining vague about whether he would send in US troops to do so.
“If we make a deal, if we make a deal now, we’re friendly, we’ll all go together” to recover this uranium, he said. “We’ll take it out and destroy it.”
