The Treasury Department escalated pressure on Iran on Tuesday, unveiling sweeping new sanctions against Mohammad Hossein Shamkhani’s shipping network as U.S. warplanes struck Iranian targets for a fourth straight day and the Navy reimposed a blockade on Iran’s ports.
The latest action, announced by the Office of Foreign Assets Control, hit more than 50 individuals, companies, and vessels accused of helping the Iranian regime move oil and launder the proceeds through an elaborate web of front companies stretching from the United Arab Emirates to Singapore, Hong Kong, the Marshall Islands, and the British Virgin Islands.
The move brings the total number of individuals, entities, and vessels sanctioned under Shamkhani’s patronage to more than 200, a scale of enforcement that underscores how central the network has become to Tehran’s ability to keep exporting crude despite years of Western sanctions.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent framed the action in blunt terms. “The Iranian regime survives on deception, and the Shamkhani network is one of its most profitable engines,” Bessent said, adding that Treasury was “shutting down the financial infrastructure that allows the regime to continue its threats to U.S. national security and global shipping.”
The network’s namesake, Mohammad Hossein Shamkhani, built his fortune leveraging the political weight of his father, Ali Shamkhani, a longtime security official and senior adviser to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
According to Treasury’s earlier findings, the younger Shamkhani operated under aliases including “H,” “Hector,” and “Hugo Hayek,” the last tied to a Dominican passport while running a fleet of tankers and container ships that shuttled Iranian and Russian crude to buyers around the world, generating tens of billions of dollars in profit.
Both father and son were killed on February 28, the opening day of the U.S.-Israeli campaign that ignited the current Middle East war, a fact that has not stopped Washington from continuing to dismantle the commercial empire the family left behind, which officials say has kept operating and even expanded into containerized shipping and broader commodities trading.
Tuesday’s action also opened a new front against Iran’s central bank. Bessent said Treasury had frozen more than $130 million held in digital wallets linked to the institution, part of what he described as an effort to “continue to aggressively follow the money and deny the Iranian regime access to the proceeds of its illicit revenue schemes.”
Analysts have noted that cryptocurrency platforms have taken on growing importance for Iran since the war began both as a tool the Revolutionary Guards have used to dodge sanctions and as a refuge for ordinary Iranians seeking to protect savings from soaring inflation and a financial system largely severed from the outside world.
The sanctions landed against a darkening military backdrop. U.S. forces struck Iranian targets for a fourth straight day, while Washington reinstated the naval blockade it first imposed on Iranian ports in mid-April, lifted in mid-June, and has now revived.
Iran, for its part, retaliated by striking vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz, according to the International Maritime Organization, a marked escalation in a waterway that carries a significant share of the world’s seaborne oil trade.
Tehran had already moved to block the strait in February following the initial U.S.-Israeli attacks, turning one of the world’s most critical energy corridors into a recurring flashpoint of the war.
Tuesday’s designations build on a maximum-pressure campaign that has been building for more than a year. Treasury’s July 2025 action against the Shamkhani network was, at the time, its largest Iran-related sanctions package since 2018, targeting over 115 individuals, entities and vessels.
Follow-up rounds in April and now July 2026 have steadily widened the net, with entities describing the network as resilient, relying on ship reflagging, falsified documentation, and shell companies to keep crude moving even as the list of blocked entities grows.
For now, Treasury officials say the message is meant to be unambiguous: as the military conflict grinds on, Washington intends to match it with an economic siege aimed at starving the Iranian regime of the export revenue that has long underwritten its regional activities.
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW
As the U.S.-Iran war enters its fourth day of strikes, Washington is fighting on two fronts at once militarily, with airstrikes and a renewed naval blockade, and financially, by dismantling the Shamkhani shipping network (now over 200 sanctioned entities) and freezing $130 million in Iran’s central bank crypto holdings.
The core takeaway: even with the network’s founders dead, Iran’s oil-export machine keeps running, and Washington’s strategy is to choke off the money as aggressively as it strikes the country itself, with the Strait of Hormuz now a live flashpoint where that pressure is being directly contested.
